Paul Temple and the Dr. Kumar Case (6)

The end is nigh, it seems. after we had send the photo of the cheque to the accountant, we got the director of EE UK Ltd, a certain Brian P. on the line. He turned out to be a very amiable man, who really appreciated our involvement in the matter. He had received the photo of the cheque, but did not recognise the account number. After checking with his accounting department he found out that they had opened a new account for the firm, with this number, but the chequebook had never arrived. There was more than sufficient money in the account to cover "our" £ 3800. And only after quite a while this transaction would have been recognised as an illegitimate withdrawal and cancelled. Brian P. had phoned his bank in the meantime and cancelled the whole chequebook. From our side we promised to send him the cheque might he need that for the police. Without much hope for a reaction we send Dr. K. a mail with the message that our bank had cleared the cheque, and that the money was in our account. we were awaiting his instructions. To our pleasant surprise they followed promptly.

"Dear Sue and Cees,
Thank you for your mail and confirmation of the money in your bank account. I have received the account details of our logistics agent, deduct cost of the transfer from the money and transfer the balance to our logistics agent today. Below is the account details;
ACCOUNT NAME: G V DE Sxxx
BANK NAME: BARCLAYS BANK
IBAN CODE: GB25BARC20143370xxxxxxx
SWIFT/BIC CODE: BARCGB22
Make the transfer today as i have notified them that they will receive the money as soon as possible. Once the transfer is done scan and send the bank transfer paper for record purposes."

I have encrypted the name and account number, because this smells again like someone has hijacked someone else's identity. Sue's parents received some time ago a phone call from a bank with the question "Had they recently opened a new bank account?". They had not, and we have always wondered why a stranger would open an account under somebody else's name. After what we know now it becomes a bit clearer. Most probably Dr. K. played a similar trick, by opening a new account in Mr. de S. name. Of course the money had to be paid in as quick as possible by us, and to be taken out ASAP by him before Mr. de S. was warned by his bank, or before he received a bank statement.

That would also explain why immediately after we received Dr. K.'s email he phoned us as well. Dr. K. sounded extremely aggressive, and he was pressing time after time that the money had to be transferred now, straight away. Dr. K. was, according to Sue, not a native English speaker. He also did not have an Indian accent, nor an African one for that matter. He was difficult to understand, and his accent could have been Arab, Eastern-European or Portuguese for that matter, but it was not a familiar German, French, Scandinavian, etc. accent.

Interesting detail : the bank from where the money was supposed to be picked up is in Leicestershire, miles away from London.

It looks like this is (for the time being) the end of this epos. We know now more or less how scams like this can operate, and the whole series might be a lesson for those who are not as suspicious as we are...




To be continued (although not very likely!)