When using your credit card in Cairo, beware the extra charges that can turn up on your statement. A number of stories have popped up in my inbox this week of credit card fraud. Customers of both Travco and La Bodega Restaurant in Zamalek, allege their cards have been copied and then used to purchase an array of goods and services, including mobile phones and even airline tickets in Canada. As the Egyptian economy purrs along, there is more and more money in the pool, attracting more and more sharks. Credit cards are an easy target. You flash your plastic and it is taken off for processing, but as happens more often than banks like to admit, the card is electronically copied in a handheld device and then cloned in a shady underground den of thieves. Except though, that image of the conniving, rat-like thief is from another time. It is more likely to be a software literate, designer labelled, upwardly mobile manager of corporate crime living in a Mediterranean villa, than a dark alley mugger. ATM machines offer another point of instant monetary hassle and they are breeding like rabbits. You don't notice them until you need one, then you see them glowing along those shady alleys where the muggers once worked, lurking as you buy your groceries and competing with the money exchanges; the industry that traditionally took care of such grubby business. If the 'hole in the wall' has ever eaten your card, or like me, you have entered the wrong PIN three times, you probably still have the damaged toes from kicking the blasted contraption in frustration. Which sometimes they deserve, and which a colleague of mine found out this week. My friend, who doesn't want to be named, correctly entered all his details into a HSBC ATM and was issued with a receipt for LE 2,000. But the machine kept the cash. My friend now has to get a letter from his British Bank before HSBC in Cairo will take the matter further. This never happened back in the day, when one actually talked to a teller, whilst depositing and withdrawing the weekly budget. Given a choice though, I like cash and visiting the money exchange. Like the ATMs they are also breeding like rabbits and inside bundles of notes are stacked in boxes, which are broken down and leave the exchange in plastic bags on bicycles or delivery scooters, to float Cairo's businesses each day. I paid a small price once for a forgery at a money exchange in Buenos Aires, but never in Cairo. In actual fact, I have been over paid once or twice, never a lot, but when did an ATM give out a little extra? Never, exactly, and don't get me started on the bank fees, they are horrific. Using a foreign card in an ATM machine you pay twice; once for the conversion and once for using the machine. No wonder they're proliferating, they really are money machines! Speaking of rabbits, I wrote several weeks ago about the current baby boom in the UK and the enormous selection of fashionable maternity wear on offer. It struck me whilst I was deciding which ATM to use outside of Mother Care at City Stars, that the baby business would be a great place to make some dough. You see, I will be contributing heavily to the baby business in the New Year and the prices at Mother Care seem to be somewhat excessive, especially when the British price tag is visible, you start to feel you are being had, caught in some kind of conspiracy between the banks, babies and bunnies. But I was treated very fairly in the Rolex shop on the 26th July in Zamalek, when I paid in foreign currency; I was given the tourist rate printed in the daily paper. But don't get me wrong, it was just a new battery and leather strap I was after and I was directed up the stairs at the back of the small showroom. Well, it was like Santa's workshop in there. Five men in an airtight room, peering through microscopes mending Swiss time pieces. A great scene, go and have a look. One place where you do get value for money though is in a Cairo taxi. On my rare outing to City Stars, I paid my cab driver LE 20 from Zamalek. The return journey in a metered yellow cab was also LE 20. And that's Cairo; it always comes back to the taxi story. Doesn't matter about international fraud and imported labels, it is all about your street credit, what you paid for your taxi.
