The Dubai Civil Court of First Instance has ordered two men to jointly pay an investor AED 4.65 million (approximately US$1.27 million) after they lured him into a sham property deal with promises of strong returns and a UAE Golden Visa.
The award comprises restitution of the AED 4.35 million (US$1.18 million) principal plus AED 300,000 (US$82,000) in compensation, along with 5% legal interest.
According to court records, reported by local media, the defendants presented the victim with documents for a property one of them supposedly owned, persuading him to hand over AED 4.35 million in cash.
No sale or ownership transfer was ever executed, and no golden visa materialized.
A criminal court had earlier convicted the pair of fraud, sentencing each to one year in prison, imposing a joint fine equal to the sum involved, and ordering their deportation.
That judgment became final after an appeal failed, which allowed the civil court to treat the fraud as conclusively established and to focus solely on damages.
The compensation award recognized harm beyond the lost principal. The court cited the claimant’s inability to invest his money for nearly a year, as well as the burden of complaints, investigations, and litigation.
Jeremy Savory, founder and CEO of Savory & Partners, reads the case as “more like a confidence trick” than a failure of the system, one that worked only because the victim didn’t know the UAE’s registration process is “all online and very sophisticated.”
The client, he suspects, “was not informed of this.”
A Year of Golden Visa Fraud Cases
The ruling arrives after a year in which golden visa fraud kept surfacing in new forms. The most visible episode was the “lifetime golden visa” hoax of July 2025, when consultancies claimed Indian and Bangladeshi nationals could secure permanent UAE residency for a flat AED 100,000 (US$27,200) fee.
The Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs and Port Security (ICP) denied the claims within a day, calling them baseless and without legal foundation, and the promoting firm publicly apologized and discontinued its golden visa advisory services.
The ICP has since issued repeated advisories, most recently in early 2026, warning against unauthorized intermediaries marketing residency on its behalf.
Marketing overreach has caused problems even in real property transactions.
In May 2026, a foreign investor’s complaint went viral after he alleged that a brokerage assured him his golden visa would be processed “almost immediately” upon purchasing an AED 3 million (US$817,000) off-plan unit, only to face months of silence; neither the developer nor the brokerage responded publicly to the allegations.
Enforcement has been active at the volume end of the market, too. In September 2025, Dubai’s Citizenship and Residency Court fined 161 defendants a combined AED 152.24 million (US$41.5 million) and ordered their deportation for trading in entry permits and abandoning sponsored employees, one of the largest visa fraud rulings in the emirate’s history.
Individual operators face the same treatment. This month, Dubai’s General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA) announced the arrest of a well-known singer who allegedly sold nearly 40 fake visas at AED 7,000 to 9,000 each, warning the public against visa offers advertised on social media.
Where Due Diligence Breaks Down
Fraud is not the only way a golden visa promise can evaporate; buying the wrong property in good faith produces the same result.
Such outcomes, Savory notes, “can happen when clients don’t conduct enough due diligence,” and his firm has handled the aftermath: clients who “invested in one of the seven UAE emirates with a promise of a golden visa” and, nine months on, own the property but face a situation where “no golden visa is possible.”
The real estate route requires that applicants own property worth at least AED 2 million (US$545,000), confirmed through official land registry records.
A unit that falls short of the threshold, carries unresolved title issues, or sits outside qualifying criteria will not support an application, no matter how sincerely it was marketed as “golden visa eligible.”
Savory points to broker licensing as the first filter; his own firm runs a brokerage registered with Dubai’s Real Estate Regulatory Agency (RERA).
Buyers can verify any broker’s license status through the Dubai Land Department’s official channels before a single dirham changes hands.
The final safeguard is the application process itself: the ICP has repeatedly stated that golden visa applications run exclusively through official government channels and that no advisory body, inside or outside the UAE, is an approved party to the process.
By the regulator’s own definition, any intermediary claiming special access, guaranteed approval, or a private nomination route is “selling a product that does not exist.”
