Palestinian Bigwig Loses Embezzled UNRWA Funds To Indian Scammer

The process ended up costing him over eighty thousand dollars of other people’s money.

Ramallah, July 28 – A senior official in President Mahmoud Abbas’s government fell prey to a common internet ruse to bilk unsuspecting users of their money today, in this case money that the official had misappropriated from United Nations allocations intended for education and basic services to descendants of Arabs displaced in a 1948 war.

Haider Abad, who holds no formal title but who has Abbas’s ear on multiple sensitive issues, erroneously provided a scammer from India with access to his online banking Thursday, resulting in the irretrievable loss of tens of thousands of dollars. Abad’s account gained the dollars in the first place by skimming monies from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. UNRWA underwrites large swaths of Palestinian childhood education, runs healthcare and other services in “refugee” camps, providing the funding either through direct expenditures or allocations to Palestinian officials who then take large chunks of the money for themselves and their cronies. This morning, however, Abad fell for a scam by Kolkata-based criminals who tricked him into believing his Amazon account had been hacked. The process ended up costing him over eighty thousand dollars of other people’s money.

A group of scammers paid for an ad that causes a popup on the user’s device when clicked, warning that online retail giant Amazon had detected fraudulent activity in the user’s account. The popup urged the user to call the company’s fraud department at a number that in fact led to the scammers’ Kolkata call center. A scammer calling himself Steve led Abad to a fake Amazon portal that installed malware on Abad’s device that allowed “Steve” to fabricate records of a bank transaction. Steve told Abad that to cancel the fraudulent order, he had to fill in a form with the refund amount. Then Steve used the malware to manipulate Abad’s screen to show a “mistake” in the transferred amount, greater than the “correct” sum by a factor of ten. Steve “caught” the mistake “too late,” as if the fake refund transaction had gone through, and that his job was now at take for allowing such a costly blunder. Abad soon agreed to transfer the overpayment – $82,375 – to a bank in Thailand, where partners of the operation that employs Steve accepted it.

Relatives and confidants of Mr. Abad discovered too late what he had done, and lamented that the international aid money he had labored so hard to embezzle would go to corrupt, exploitative South Asians instead of corrupt, exploitative Southwest Asians.

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