ISLAMABAD (The Thursday Times) — The National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency on Saturday warned young people against taking jobs at illegal call centres for high salaries, after raids in Islamabad and Rawalpindi this week led to 154 arrests.
Muhammad Shoaib Khan, the agency’s additional director for Islamabad and Rawalpindi, told a press conference that educated young people and university students were being drawn to such jobs because the pay was higher than average, but risked becoming part of fraud operations.
He urged jobseekers to ask employers where their companies were registered, and appealed to parents to check whether their children were working at a call centre that carried out scams.
“Ask them what documents the company has, what registration it operates under, which company they work for, which company is providing the loans, where the money is coming from and who is putting money into these applications,” Khan said.
“If your son or daughter is arrested in such an operation, the FIR becomes part of their record. Tomorrow, when they need a character certificate or apply for a government job, that record can affect them,” he said.
Khan said the agency had raided two call centres in the Islamabad-Rawalpindi zone over the past three days. Eleven people, including 10 women, were arrested in Rawalpindi, and 143, including 43 women, in Islamabad. He said both centres ran transnational scams targeting people in other South Asian countries.
At the Rawalpindi centre, operators offered loans and then, when collecting repayment or extorting money, told victims they were under surveillance or on a hit list, Khan said. Victims were then put in touch with a setup made to look like the police in Bangladesh, where someone posing as an officer demanded money.
The Islamabad centre persuaded victims to install a mobile application that gave it access to their photo gallery, Khan said. It issued small loans, but its real aim was to collect personal data, including details of family members named as guarantors.
Khan said fraud networks were exploiting weak checks in company registration. Companies registered with poor verification were given bank accounts, which were then linked to loan apps and betting and gaming portals to move illicit money. He called for stricter rules on registering companies and verifying bank accounts, and said the agency was preparing recommendations for the institutions involved.
He said investigators worked out the role of each person arrested, from those who made the calls to those who edited material, before cases were registered. “We do not treat everyone as having played the same role,” he said.
Earlier this month, the agency said it had arrested 273 people in a raid on a Karachi call centre and that up to 350 suspected scam centres were operating in the city.
