UAE Petrol Retailers Are Breaking The Law It Seems

(Photo credit: 401(K) 2013)

A report in today's Gulf News quotes Omar Bu Shahab, CEO of the Commercial Compliance and Consumer Protection Division (CCCP) in the Department of Economic Development in Dubai as saying that charging 2% fees on credit and debit card transactions is a violation of consumer protection law.

While he was commenting on an attempt by a GEMS school to levy a 2% processing fee on credit and debit card transactions, his clarification also applies to Emarat and EPPCO/ENOC service stations, which charge the fee on credit card transactions for fuel. This surcharge appears to have been the resolution of a spat between the credit card companies and the fuel distributors dating back to 2007 - and the early days of this here very blog. The story from way back then is suitably linked 'ere. Basically, the retailers (not ADNOC, you'll note) have always charged extra for credit card purchases, in violation of the card issuers' agreements and when the card companies kicked off, the retailers just stopped taking credit cards. They've recently started again, but with a Dhs2 'service fee' on any transaction for fuel up to Dhs100. In short, 2%...

“Retailers who are charging extra fees on the credit card or debt card payments are violating the consumer protection law and will be subject to penalties,” Mr Bu Shahab told the newspaper that tells it like it is.*

So it'll be interesting to hear what the petrol companies say when the media come calling, won't it?

*Well, sometimes.

"With inputs from agencies" - More Copy/Paste Gulf News Shenanigans

Gulf News (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News' inside front cover story today (flagged on the front cover) will be familiar to anyone who's been online over the past few days - the gang who ripped off tens of millions of dollars from RAKBank and Bank Muscat and the two alleged gang members who photographed themselves with a pile of cash in their car.

It carries a local byline but signs off with a little tag in italics - with inputs from agencies. So what precisely does that mean? Well, as we've seen before with similar GN stories, it means whole wodges of the report are actually not written by Gulf News at all, but simply copied and pasted from the newswires. I have alluded to this practice before. In the case of this story, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI", Gulf News has used the text of a Bloomberg report verbatim - in fact, the story from the words "the digital currency company" to the end is Bloomberg's report. It represents a little under half the entire extent of the story.

Much of the rest of it is mostly rewritten or just plain copied from an Associated Press file:

On two pre-arranged days — once in December and again in February — criminals loaded with the lucrative debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. In December, they worked for about 2 1/2 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. Two months later, apparently buoyed by their success, they hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
Associated Press (running as "Bloodless bank heist impressed cybercrime experts" in The Guardian)

On a pre-arranged day in December, criminals loaded with the debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. They worked for about 2.5 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. In February, the gang hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
Gulf News, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI"

So there we go. A story that happened right under Gulf News' nose, covered by cutting and pasting agency reports and the practice justified by 'with inputs from agencies', when in fairness what it really should say is 'with no real input from Gulf News'.