fraudulent activity of injecting US dollars | Victims of frozen dollars in North Syria

SOHR activists have reported recently, spread of a new method of scam which is known as the “Frozen U.S Dollars” in several Syrian areas especially in the north regions. This fraud is defined as an exchange of large amounts of frozen dollar bill that has no bank serial number as in return of less than half of its real value.

This method has become a profession of some and has been promoted through social media as “Facebook” platform and many Syrian civilians were subject to loss the value of their money.

Traders of money exchange and frozen dollars claimed that the source for these large amounts of dollars is originally frozen money in Libya, Iraq and other countries. They insist that the dollars could be exchanged with local exchange offices without any problem, but couldn’t be deposited in banks because it has no serial number. This kind of dollars are suitable for inhabitants of north Syria that lacks banks, and usually money is spent in a simple way.

The fraudulent activity started with choosing and convincing the victim with all ways to buy the frozen dollars. The process happened between two persons, one claiming to have large amounts of frozen U.S dollars, and the victim who try to exchange an amount of money in return for may be more than double the real value.

The money traders try to convince the victim that the money is real and can easily be exchange or spent. But, once the victim is convinced, the scammer works on using special ways for delivering and receiving the money. Sometimes, scammer deceive the transaction offices and withdraw the deposited money before the victim could get it and it happened a lot in Syria.

In other cases, according to eyewitnesses in Turkey, scammer agree with victims on the hand-to-hand transfer of money, but he threw bag of money and flees the scene swiftly claiming he is wanted by the security men. After opening the bag, the victim, who doesn’t have any time to investigate the money, discovers the bag is full of counterfeit money.

Currency experts stressed the traded dollars are counterfeit money and not frozen dollars, adding that even the money counting machines are not accurate as resetted to pass any paper currency without giving any alarm. They added other reasons to prove the frozen dollars are not available is that the companies which freeze their money for some reasons do not have bank accounts.