Criminal Court: Expat Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison and Deported for Stealing 13,500 KD from Citizen's Account
The Criminal Court sentenced an expatriate to imprisonment and deportation for his involvement in stealing 13,500 KD from a citizen's account via electronic fraud.
Translated by Qiyas from السياسة — Original source
A criminal court sentenced an expatriate to three years’ imprisonment with hard labor and deportation from Kuwait after serving his sentence, convicting him of conspiring to electronically steal 13,500 Kuwaiti dinars from a Kuwaiti woman’s bank account through a fraud scheme that involved impersonating a government employee and luring the victim into downloading remote-control software.
The incident began when the woman received a call from a man who claimed to be an employee of the Consumer Protection Administration at the Ministry of Commerce. He told her the call concerned a complaint she had previously filed and asked her to download the “AnyDesk” application and enter her bank account details. She later discovered that the money had been withdrawn from her account at the Commercial Bank without her knowledge or consent.
Investigations revealed that the funds were transferred on the day of the incident to the first defendant’s bank account, which he then transferred in full to the second defendant’s account.
The court based its conviction of the first defendant on the victim’s statements, police inquiries, documents from the Commercial Bank, and bank account statements. It considered the sequence of transfers, the matching amounts, the movement of funds between accounts on the same day, and the immediate disposal of the money as corroborating evidence of his participation in the crime and his use of his account to receive and handle the stolen funds.
Lawyer Abdulmohsen Al-Qattan, representing the victim as her agent and the complainant, filed a civil claim against the defendants, seeking interim civil compensation of 5,001 Kuwaiti dinars for damages resulting from the incident.
The court acquitted the second defendant of the charges against him, while sentencing the first defendant to three years’ imprisonment with hard labor and deportation after serving his sentence, and ordered the confiscation of forged documents.
It also referred the civil case to the competent court for a ruling on the compensation claim, noting that examining it would require a special investigation that could delay the resolution of the criminal case.
