Pakistan’s Scam Call Centre Raids Net Hundreds, Few Verdicts Known

LAHORE/ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s cybercrime agency has arrested dozens more people in raids on call centres accused of defrauding victims in Britain, Australia and the United States, extending a campaign that has detained more than 800 suspects since August, a large share of them foreign nationals.

In the latest operations, the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) raided a centre in Karachi named as Callion and held 33 people on allegations of stealing foreigners’ data and committing bank fraud. In Lahore it arrested 17 women at what it called a honey-trap operation, in which men were drawn into long online conversations and video calls and then pressed for gifts and money.

A second Lahore raid, in Allama Iqbal Town, led to the arrest of nine men accused of selling British customers mobile phones that never arrived. In Islamabad a man was held over an alleged Rs10.4 million investment fraud against a Pakistani citizen.

Director General Syed Ali Nasir Rizvi is supervising the campaign personally, the agency says, under a zero-tolerance policy ordered by Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi. He has promised no leniency for those who exploit the innocent and urged the public not to share financial details with unknown callers.

On October 5, 38 people were arrested at a Lahore office posing as a medical billing firm and more than three dozen at two other sites. On September 28 a raid in Rawalpindi’s Satellite Town netted 61 suspects, 155 laptops and 71 phones. Investigators say one Rawalpindi centre used fake Telegram romances to steer Australians into bogus cryptocurrency investments.

In mid-September three centres in Islamabad yielded 212 detainees, Chinese and Pakistani men and women, in a network the agency linked to India and Brazil. In Karachi, 27 people including four Afghans were accused of posing as American bank officials with stolen social security numbers and card data in their possession.

August produced the largest single haul. Authorities detained 258 foreigners at a site on the edge of Islamabad, among them 170 Vietnamese and 40 Chinese nationals. “They came to Pakistan on tourist visas,” an FIA official told the news agency AFP, adding that embassies had been informed and that deportation was a possible outcome. Earlier that month 111 Chinese and three Vietnamese citizens were arrested over a romance and sextortion ring run from a registered IT business.

The foreign presence is not a coincidence. Analysts at the China-Global South Project say pressure on scam compounds in Southeast Asia appears to be driving them to other regions, and expect closer cooperation between Chinese police and their counterparts elsewhere. AFP reported that it had asked China’s foreign ministry for comment on the detentions. The FIA has since decided to blacklist 671 foreign nationals arrested in the raids.

The traffic runs both ways. The FIA told parliament in June that 3,312 Pakistanis who travelled to Cambodia since 2024 have not returned, many of them believed to be held in scam operations there. Pakistan is importing the industry’s managers and exporting its labour.

The campaign’s own history is uneven. By one account, an earlier push known as Operation Grey failed, and in August the government set up a new task force under FIA headquarters that includes intelligence agencies, forensic experts, police and district officials and reports daily to the interior ministry.

The reason for that redesign is on the record. In November 2025 the FIA named ten of the cybercrime agency’s own officers in a corruption case, alleging that staff had taken about Rs15 million a month from 15 illegal call centres. The agency has had three directors general in 18 months; Mr Rizvi was appointed on September 16, days before the present wave began.

Cases are registered under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, the penal code and, for foreigners, the Foreigners Act. The agency has released no figures on how many of this year’s detainees have been charged, tried or convicted. If most foreigners are simply deported, the organisers lose a building and a visa, and little else.

Mass arrests raise rights questions of their own. Those detained include junior staff on scripts and, in Lahore, 17 women. United Nations investigators have documented that many workers in Southeast Asian scam compounds were themselves trafficked and coerced. Whether detainees here are screened for that, and given lawyers and consular access, is something the agency should state.

The lawful industry has warned about collateral damage before. In 2021 the software houses’ association P@SHA protested at what it called “raids without clear evidence” and said publicising unproven cases could cause lasting harm to the country’s IT exports. Pakistan’s reputation had already been scarred by the Axact fake-degree scandal of 2015.

Pakistan’s crackdown places it on the right side of that fight. Publishing charge sheets and verdicts alongside the arrest counts would show that it intends to stay there.