Dubai: After oil companies, hospitals and schools in the UAE, a Dubai tour company has fallen prey to scamsters running fake job rackets.

Staff at Emirates House Travel and Tourism LLC say they were shocked to discover how another company duplicated their website to use in bogus employment letters.

“A friend of mine received this offer supposedly from a renowned clinic, asking him to make a deposit to cover his initial ‘employment costs’ to a travel agency called Westgate Travel and Tours LLC. The letter appeared dubious anyway, but the moment we logged on to the company’s website we knew the whole story. The website looked just like ours,” said Shahid Bashir, 32, one of the proprietors of the family-owned business.

“Not only is it an infringement of our website’s copyright policies but also a swipe at our reputation. They have copied our credentials to make themselves look like a genuine tour company, but in reality they don’t exist,” he said.

The website of the dodgy firm Westgate was removed this week after Bashir lodged a police complaint, but XPRESS has a screengrab of it, which is a spitting image of the original site.

Intriguingly the fake site did not have any contact number, landline or otherwise while the HTML code of their website confirmed that a software was used to copy from http://www.emirateshousett.com/index.html.

Queensland connection

A quick search on the internet revealed this domain was registered in Queensland, Australia. Interestingly a fake website of a Dubai school that scamsters used in May this year to target teachers, as revealed earlier by XPRESS, was also registered in Queensland.

“My company does not have in any way a connection to this fraudulent business, but I fear we may be mistaken as one of them,” says Zahid Bashir Ahmad, business development manager of Emirates House.

The mobile number of Peter Hammam, supposedly of West-gate Travel and Tours LLC, remains unreachable.