Karachi is home to somewhere between 300 and 350 scam and card-skimming call centres, according to an official at the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency, who said the agency will not go easy on anyone running one.
The agency’s latest tally covers 53 days. In that period it fielded 10,386 complaints, opened 6,672 inquiries and filed 442 cases. It detained 1,749 suspects and recovered more than Rs. 149.8 million.
Call centres made up a large share of the work. Raids numbered 59, leading to 43 cases and 973 arrests, among them 211 foreign nationals. Officers carted off 15,502 items. The agency says 329 of them were laptops loaded with forged IDs and card data. Earlier this month the agency arrested 273 people at one Karachi call centre accused of scamming foreigners.
Additional Director Shahzad Akbar laid out the pattern. Akbar’s description is of centres staffed by young people who ought to be studying, aimed at residents and retirees alike. Victims holding cards are drawn in with offers and then lose the money in their accounts. Akbar added that a company ranked among the sector’s top three had already been targeted, and not for the first time.
The Karachi range is an official’s estimate and the method was not described. Not everyone is convinced by the raids either: an IT industry body argued on 10 November that they are hitting legitimate firms as well as scammers.
Alongside the raids, the agency’s Cyber Patrolling Unit checked 4,530 URLs over the same period and sent 1,186 illegal links to the telecom regulator to be blocked.
