A Frustrated Resident Has Been Tweeting His Experience With A Real Estate Company In Dubai And There Is A Lesson In It For Us All
It can be confusing for all of us to understand how consumer protection works and how to make the most of it.
Social media is probably not the most effective way to get around it (usually).
Rakish Khandelwal moved to Dubai last year and found a hotel apartment to stay in for a year through a brokerage he found online
When he decided to end the contract, the hotel refused to pay his security deposit right away.
He has been tweeting a letter he wrote about the experience to DTCM, to the Dubai police and a few local news media ever since.
You can read the entire letter here
Khandelwal filed a formal complaint with DTCM the following day and a representative told him that investigations had begun
Within a couple of weeks, DTCM informed him that they had visited the establishment and had taken the necessary action.
(The brokerage that he had gotten the hotel apartment through, it turns out, had their real estate license expired in 2008.)
They also mentioned that this issue didn’t quiet fall under their department.
They forwarded his complaint to the consumer protection department
There were some more more back and forth – according to his last update, he was told to take the matter to court (according to the tweets, he didn’t get around to it).
He has left the country since but has been persistently tweeting (and number those tweets – he was on tweet #18 last time we checked) his complaint.
The Dubai Police have replied that he should visit the nearest police station for assistance
Please visit the nearest police station to file a complaint. For more information, kindly call us on: 901.#YourSecurityOurHappiness
— Dubai Policeشرطة دبي (@DubaiPoliceHQ) September 3, 2017