Sisters charged in BD31,000 stolen card phone scam

TDT | Manama

Email: mail@newsofbahrain.com

Two sisters, of Arab origin, flew into Bahrain on visit visas.

Within three months they had helped order 77 mobile phones worth more than BD31,000 using stolen credit card details from a Gulf country.

The women, aged 39 and 35, were not acting alone.

A 26-year-old Arab man, still at large, handled the online side from abroad. He placed the orders using hacked bank card data.

The deliveries all went to the sisters’ address in Bahrain. They received the goods, sold them, and passed the money back to him.

Staff at the electronics company began to notice something wasn’t right. The same address kept coming up.

The payments were foreign, but the deliveries local. They alerted the authorities.

An officer from the Ministry of Interior’s National Financial Intelligence Centre said the orders were placed between September and December 2024.

The total came to BD31,081.366. Police traced the address and arrested the two women.

Shipments

The second defendant admitted receiving regular shipments two or three times a month.

She said she was told to open four or five Bahraini SIM cards and hand over the numbers.

Her co-defendant backed up the story.