Cybercrime Agency Raids Call Centres in Three Cities, Arrests 300+ in a Single Week

Pakistan's cybercrime agency arrested more than 300 people in a single week in early October, raiding illegal call centres in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore that investigators say were defrauding foreign nationals out of their bank details and savings.

What happened, city by city

The National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) opened the month with raids on facilities in Islamabad's E-11 and G-10 sectors, taking 212 people into custody, including both Pakistani and Chinese nationals. A separate Karachi operation hit two alleged call centres operating in the PECHS area, arresting more than 70 people. Officials put the combined total from that early-October push at more than 300 arrests across the two cities.

The agency didn't stop there. On October 4, NCCIA teams raided illegal call centres in Lahore's Faisal Town and Johar Town, arresting 36 suspects accused of using dialer software to run scams on people abroad. Three days later, on October 7, a raid on a call centre near Metropole in Karachi added more than 30 further arrests — this one targeting an operation that investigators say posed as representatives of US banks, extracted sensitive financial information from foreign nationals, then moved money out of their accounts. Officers seized phones, laptops, other devices, data and bank cards, and said the investigation into the network's full scale was continuing.

How the scam actually works

The pattern across these raids is consistent: call centre staff, working off scripts and using voice-masking or dialer software, impersonate bank officials, government agencies or other trusted institutions to foreign nationals — most often in the US, UK and Gulf states — and talk victims into handing over card numbers, one-time passcodes or remote access to their devices. The money is then moved through layers of local accounts before being withdrawn or further laundered. It's the same fraud architecture Pakistan's telecom sector has been trying to choke off at the network level, even as providers simultaneously court foreign capital — Jazz parent VEON raised its three-year Pakistan investment to $1.5 billion just last week, a reminder that the same digital infrastructure cuts both ways.

The agency policing this has its own track record problem

The NCCIA was stood up in April 2024 specifically to take this kind of enforcement out of the FIA's hands and give it a dedicated, PECA-empowered agency. Eighteen months on, the numbers it has reported to its own parliamentary overseers complicate the story of a crackdown working. A Senate Standing Committee on IT briefing covering January 2024 through June 2025 recorded 450 arrests — 195 Pakistanis and 255 foreign nationals — across 63 raids in six major cities, with roughly Rs 72 million in identified fraud and about Rs 40 million recovered. A separate briefing to the National Assembly this year put the five-month national total at 77,023 cybercrime complaints, 457 registered cases, 520 arrests — and eight convictions.

That gap between arrests and convictions is the real story behind this month's raid numbers. Pakistan can clearly locate and shut down individual call centres when it chooses to look; what it has not yet shown is that doing so translates into prosecutions that stick, in a court system already working through a backlog that stretches cases into years or decades. Suspects released on bail can, and by multiple accounts do, resurface running the same operation under a different address within months.

Why foreign nationals keep ending up as the victims

Pakistan-based scam call centres targeting Americans, Britons and Gulf residents isn't new, but the scale of this October's enforcement, concentrated in a single week across three cities, is unusually visible even by NCCIA's own recent record. Part of the pressure is external: Pakistan's banking and telecom sectors are under growing scrutiny from US and UK regulators whenever fraud proceeds are traced back through correspondent banking or SIM infrastructure registered here, and a visible domestic crackdown is one of the few levers Islamabad has to manage that reputational exposure while its IMF programme and foreign investment pipeline both depend on confidence in the country's institutions.

For the agency itself, the open question is whether October's raid numbers represent a step up in enforcement capacity or simply a louder version of a cycle that has repeated every few months since 2024: raid, arrest, announce a total, and move on to the next tip. The eight convictions out of 520 arrests nationally this year suggest the bottleneck isn't finding the call centres. It's what happens to the case afterward.

Build Better Pakistan's Security Desk tracks cybercrime enforcement and digital fraud and will update this piece if NCCIA or the FIA release prosecution outcomes tied to these raids.