Beware of pens with vanishing ink, warn police

Gulf News -- Sharjah Police have warned residents against using someone else’s pen when signing cheques as they have registered cases of the ink getting erased and fraudsters presenting the cheques to banks after entering new amounts.

The pens involved are varieties of the Uniball and Frixon brands, police said.

Most of the cases registered with police are regarding customers of banks falling victims to representatives of banks, who have targeted business owners and car dealers.

The representatives allegedly would issue customers a debit or credit card against a cheque, while offering their pen to write the cheque amount. Later, as the ink disappeared, they would change the value of the cheque.

Brigadier Dr Abdul Qader Mohammad Al Ameri, consultant and head of the Criminal Laboratory Department at Sharjah Police, said the department has cutting-edge equipment and expertise to crack such cases and identify what was written originally before the changes were made.

Syed Shaaban, an anti-counterfeiting expert at the police laboratory, said the ink in the forgery cases came from Uniball pens, or pens whose ink vanished when exposed to heat.

He added that most of the previous forgery cases involved criminals linked to the jobs or organisations where the transactions took place. For example, in visa forgery, the suspect would be working in the residency and foreign affairs department; in currency cases, the suspect would be linked to the bank concerned.