It started on a flight to Moscow.
On a flight from Dubai to Moscow someone took my wallet out of my backpack. It had more than 3,000 dollars in cash. I only found out three days later, when I went through the bag in my hotel room. By then there was nothing to trace and nobody to ask.
After that trip I kept hearing the same kind of story from friends and other expats. A passport left in a hotel safe. A bag taken on a train. A wallet gone at a café. Each time, the money was the smaller problem.
If you live in the UAE and lose your passport abroad, you lose your residence visa with it. You can't fly back to Dubai. You fly to your home country, apply for a new passport, wait, then start the paperwork to get back into the UAE. That takes weeks and costs thousands of dirhams in flights, fees and missed work.
With a Keep card in that wallet, my phone would have warned me the moment the wallet moved more than about 1.5 metres from me, while I was still in my seat. I could have rung it and found it before the plane landed. And because it looks like an ordinary credit card, a thief has no reason to pull it out and throw it away.
That is why I started Keep.
