DOHA: Exchange of mobile phones and the mobile repair business have been hit hard by the crackdown on several service outlets by the Ministry of Interior last August following customer complaints about blackmail.
Service shops are complaining of low customer turnout after some 35 staffers of various digital sales and service outlets were arrested in August for blackmailing their clientele, mostly women.
The arrested had copied images and videos saved on customers’ phones without their knowledge and used them for blackmail.
They demanded huge sums from device owners threatening to post the images and videos could be posted on social networking sites.
After the arrests, some repair and maintenance outlets are so scared that they have stopped entertaining Qatari customers, particularly, for software-related work.
“If the repair is for hardware, we accept a mobile phone handset but definitely not for maintenance, installation or repair of software,” said an official from a service shop.
He said customer turnout for repair and maintenance and exchange of old mobile phone handsets had also come down drastically after the August arrests.
People have generally turned suspicious and were not able to trust these outlets, said the service shop official. “The fear is on both the sides — customers as well as the service shops.”
Being a conservative society, people here don’t want to share or make public their personal and family images and video clippings as well as personal details.
The Ministry of Interior has, meanwhile, cautioned the public that getting applications downloaded on smart-phones with help from service shops can also be risky as many of them require personal details.
For example, downloading programmes like iCloud can be risky, particularly for women. “So there is a need to be cautious,” said the Interior Ministry on its tweet account.
The Ministry said in a statement earlier in August that copying data from others’ devices without their permission is a punishable offence.
Knowledgeable circles, meanwhile, said that digital exchange and service centres should be asked to sign written undertakings at the time of being licensed.
They should commit not to indulge in unethical practices like copying images and data and breach customers’ privacy and subject them to any kind of blackmail.
Asked why he thought some service shops in Qatar resorted to unethical practices like copying images and videos of customers and blackmail, a social behaviour expert said greed could be one of the factors. Sexual frustration could be another reason as most customers subjected to blackmail were women, he added.
The Peninsula
