DUBAI // An Etisalat customer care agent is accused of illegally obtaining more than three million rewards points from customers.
Dubai Criminal Court heard that the Egyptian defendant, 25, denied a charge of embezzling 3,467,000 points, valued at Dh29,000. The points were in the form of coupons that can be used at shops that are in partnership with Etisalat.
He also denied charges of forgery and use of forged documents by altering rewards points electronically and then saving them on Etisalat’s system.
“We exchange usernames and passwords among us at the customer care centre, and someone else could have used mine to make the forgeries,” the defendant said in court, telling the judge that he had already spent six months in jail.
The fraud allegedly occurred between July 2015 and October 2016.
Prosecutors said that the defendant’s job was to answer calls from Etisalat customers on its 101 number and through his work he noticed that several callers had no idea that they had rewards points. He could see on the company’s system that they were not being used by the owners.
The defendant allegedly used the coupons to buy items on Souq.com, at Pizza Hut, KFC, Carrefour, Royal Cinema and also to buy flight tickets.
The con came to light when a customer noticed his points had gone missing and he called Etisalat, which investigated and later reported the defendant.
The next hearing will be on May 17.
salamir@thenational.ae
