Software houses in Pakistan want the cyber crime agency to stop treating them like scam call centres. The Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) wants any search of a registered IT firm to need a court warrant and follow agreed procedures. It also wants a shared panel with the agency to handle complaints.
The trigger is NCCIA’s crackdown on fraud operations, which has produced large raids in Karachi. P@SHA says its members got caught in the sweep: teams arrived without showing warrants, kept employees for long stretches and left with laptops, servers and phones, including at offices where investigators found nothing illegal.
The association’s worry is exports. IT earned $4.6 billion in FY26, it says, and the government wants $10 billion by FY29. Chairman Dr Shoab Ahmed Khan said overseas buyers act quickly on news of a raid, and a client could shift work to India, the Philippines or Eastern Europe. “Fraudsters may lose a call centre, but Pakistan loses an entire market,” he said.
This is not the first time the association has made this complaint. In 2021 it condemned FIA raids on IT companies in Karachi and asked for a transparent investigation.
P@SHA does not oppose action against fraud, and it notes that NCCIA has itself said some scammers register as IT firms. Its list of requests: check a company’s registration with the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) and with P@SHA before any raid; copy data on site instead of removing hardware; return unrelated devices within seven days; treat staff with respect, women especially; and stop interfering with CCTV recordings. The proposed committee would bring together NCCIA, P@SHA, the IT ministry and PSEB.
The complaint adds to a debate that has run alongside the raids: the agency is going after scam operations, while the industry says enforcement has to separate registered exporters from those fronts. P@SHA says the best response is process, not less enforcement.
NCCIA had not replied to the statement at the time of writing.
