Close the scam centres, and the doors that keep them open

Cybercrime officers walked into a building beside Karachi’s Shahrah-e-Faisal this week and came out with 273 people, more than 300 laptops and 152 mobile phones. The official in charge says the city has another 300 to 350 operations like it. This newspaper welcomes the raid, and the tougher approach behind it. But a crackdown that fills police vans with clerks and teenagers while the owners, the financiers and, too often, the protectors carry on will not close an industry of this size. Scam call centres are organised crime, and they steal from the world in Pakistan’s name.

The details from the Karachi raid are grim. Among those arrested were more than 100 women and 42 people under 18, according to Additional Director Shahzad Akbar of the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency. A defence lawyer told the court the true numbers were higher, with more than 70 juveniles and over 80 women. The agency says the seized laptops held fake identities and credit card details, that people based abroad were involved, and that the operation targeted both foreigners and Pakistanis. A magistrate granted physical remandCustody with the police or an investigating agency for questioning, granted by a magistrate for a fixed number of days. Judicial remand means jail while the case proceeds. of nine main suspects, released the women and minors on bail and sent the rest to jail. Nobody has yet been convicted of anything.

Mr Akbar described the company as one of the three biggest scam call centres in Karachi. He also said something more important. For the first time, employees have been named in a case alongside the owner. Until now, he said, only owners were charged, and their relatives would simply open a new company with the same staff. Parents of the underage workers will also be brought into the case under Section 109The Pakistan Penal Code section on abetment: it makes a person who helps or encourages an offence liable to the same punishment as the offence itself., he said.

Not a Karachi problem

It would be comforting to treat this as one city’s problem. It is not. Over the past 16 months the same story has been told in Faisalabad, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, with the numbers growing each time.

The Rawalpindi case shows how far this has gone. According to Malaysian police, callers at the centre in Bahria Town posed as bank staff and told victims in Malaysia that suspicious transactions had appeared on their accounts. The calls were then passed to people pretending to be Malaysian police officers, some in uniform, who threatened the victims with money laundering charges until they paid. The money moved through electronic wallets and into cryptocurrency. Malaysian police say the operation was allegedly directed by a Malaysian based in Cambodia.

That is the shape of the modern scam business. It is an industry best known for its compounds in Southeast Asia, and its organisers move their call floors to wherever labour is cheap, office space is easy to rent and enforcement looks weak. If Pakistan becomes known as one of those places, the cost will not be measured only in arrests.

Who pays

The first victims are the people at the other end of the line: ordinary people in Malaysia, America and elsewhere, and, according to officials, Pakistanis too. Many lose money they cannot replace. They will never know the name of the young man in Karachi or Islamabad who read the script to them, but they may well remember the country code.

The second victim is Pakistan’s honest technology industry, which has been one of the economy’s genuine successes. IT exports reached a record of about $4.6 billion in the last financial year, according to central bank figures, and earnings from IT freelancers passed $1 billion for the first time. That growth rests on trust. A company in Lahore that answers customer calls for a firm in Texas, or a freelancer in Peshawar billing a client in Berlin, depends on banks, payment platforms and foreign clients believing that a Pakistani address is not a warning sign. Every scam traced back here makes their work a little harder.

The third victim is less visible: the workers themselves. Many of those arrested are young people answering advertisements for call centre jobs that pay better than most entry-level work and ask only for passable English. Some know exactly what they are doing. Others learn within days and stay because they need the salary. A 17-year-old who reads a scam script has done wrong, but he is not the person who designed the script, rented the floor or moved the money.

The protectors

There is an uncomfortable question underneath all this, and the state should face it squarely. A centre with hundreds of staff and hundreds of computers on one of Karachi’s busiest roads does not hide. Someone rents it the space, someone supplies the internet connections and the SIM cards, and someone, in too many cases, is paid to look away.

The cybercrime agency knows this better than anyone, because it has been through it. In November last year the FIA arrested five of its officers, including an additional director, over allegations that they collected monthly payments from call centres in Rawalpindi and Bahria Town in return for protection. The alleged extortion ran into hundreds of millions of rupees, and the FIA later told a Senate committee it had recovered about Rs42.5 million from officials. Those cases are still before the courts, and the accused are entitled to the presumption of innocence. But the allegations alone show why enforcement against this trade has to be watched as closely as the trade itself.

The agency’s leadership deserves credit for not burying that episode, and for the new approach since. Prosecuting foreign nationals in Pakistan instead of simply deporting them, as it decided last month, removes the old revolving door through which organisers could leave and come back. Naming employees as well as owners closes another. These are real changes, and they were needed.

What should happen now

First, follow the money. Scam centres exist to move cash, and the trail runs through banks, electronic wallets, cryptocurrency traders and informal money changers. The State Bank and the Financial Monitoring Unit should work with the agency to freeze accounts, trace who receives the proceeds and seize assets, including property bought with them. A raid that ends with laptops in an evidence room but the money untouched has only interrupted the business.

Second, go after the facilitators. Landlords who rent whole floors to companies with no visible clients, internet providers who wire them and dealers who sell SIM cards in bulk should all face questions. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has the tools to detect unusual calling and data patterns. It should use them, and share what it finds.

Third, reach the organisers abroad. Many of these operations are run from outside Pakistan. Malaysia has already offered to send investigators, and China has a clear interest in stopping its nationals from being drawn into these schemes. Joint investigations, shared intelligence and extradition requests where the law allows will do more than another hundred arrests of junior staff.

Fourth, treat the young carefully. Minors found at these centres should be dealt with through juvenile justice and diversion, not jail. Charging their parents with abetment may make sense where a parent knowingly sent a child into a scam, but it should not become routine punishment for poor families who believed their son had found a respectable office job. The real deterrent is to make the owners pay.

Fifth, keep the enforcers honest and publish the results. The agency should report each year how many people it has arrested at call centres, how many were charged, how many were convicted and how much money was recovered. Officers working these cases should rotate regularly, and complaints against them should go to someone outside the chain of command. Public numbers are the best protection against both incompetence and corruption.

Finally, protect the legitimate industry. Genuine call centres and outsourcing firms should be easy to verify. Registration with the Pakistan Software Export Board, or a similar public register, with a simple online check, would let foreign clients and banks tell the difference between a real business and a front. The honest firms have every reason to support it.

A country’s good name

Pakistan has spent years arguing, with good reason, that it is a place where talented young people can do skilled work for the world. The freelancers and software houses that have built that case did it one client at a time. Scam centres undo it in the same way, one stolen saving at a time.

The Karachi raid shows that the state has started to take the problem seriously. The test now is whether the next headline is about another 273 arrests, or about the first big fraud network to lose its money, its premises and its protectors. Only the second will close these centres for good.