After two more visits and another telephone call to the US, we finally got a call from our local agent that we could come in to pick up our money.

At this point you may be thinking "he got resolution," and - eventually - we did, but the story has quite a few twists in it. Please, read on to see what I deal with over here in Dubai.

During the call, the agent said, "The German bank only sent XXX amount, so you won't be getting back your whole transfer payment."

Needless to say, I disagreed fervently, and even eventually mentioned, "Not only did you not perform the service that was contracted, you had my money for four weeks. In actuality, you should be paying me interest, not cutting my refunded amount."

I decided this was better discussed in person, and went into the office where I made my initial transfer, along with my copy of the contract. Again, they said that "since the money has already been converted to US currency" I'd only be refunded the amount of the returned deposit, less fees for the conversion, fees for the new conversion back to local currency, and less the fee for the initial transfer.

No deal. I said again that they were going to give me the entire amount for failure to perform according to the contract. The agent made a call, and said, "OK, we'll refund the whole amount."

Again, the story does not end there.

The agent then started working with another agent, going through the drawer, counting money in their machine, filling out forms... basically spending more than five minutes before having me sign 3 different forms (without a lot of explanation), and finally handing me a bundle of money and saying, "Goodbye."

I then counted the money right there on the counter where I was given the money. Stashed right there in the middle of what was more or less a pile o $250 dollar bill equivalents was a single $125 equivalent. I pulled it out, and put it with the other bills of the same denomination and kept counting.

I came out $125 under the amount I was due. They then made another big show of balancing the guy's drawer, even going to the point of grabbing a briefcase from the back full of $3.00 bill equivalents, and finally gave me the balance I was due.

My wife, who was there at the time, asked me if I felt they shorted us on purpose. My answer, "Definitely. That's why they made the big show. They saw I never did anything but count the money. They only needed to recount it themselves to see I was shorted. They showed no surprise or suspicion that I might have shorted them. The whole refund show was a fabrication to try to get us to walk away without counting."

I got all my money.

No, I won't be using this shady group ever again. Instead, I'll be paying the bank more, for more security.