NCCIA detains 212 in Islamabad raids on cyber fraud call centres

ISLAMABAD: The National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency has detained 212 people during raids on three suspected illegal call centres in Islamabad over the past 24 hours, officials said on Tuesday.

The raids targeted centres in sectors E-11 and G-10 as part of a wider crackdown on organised cyber fraud and networks allegedly targeting people abroad, according to an NCCIA spokesperson cited by Minute Mirror.

The agency said those detained included Pakistani and Chinese nationals. Investigators seized a large quantity of electronic equipment, including 306 mobile phones, 383 computers and CPUs, and 299 monitors and laptops.

Preliminary findings suggest the suspects were allegedly involved in international fraud schemes using Google-related scams and so-called "low-dating" schemes. Investigators say the network was also allegedly connected to operations in India and Brazil.

A case has been registered and further investigation is under way to determine the exact nature of the alleged activities and identify other possible links, the agency said.

The Islamabad operation follows several recent NCCIA actions. Days earlier, the agency detained 27 suspects, including four Afghan nationals, during a raid on an alleged international scam call centre in Karachi. The suspects were accused of posing as authorised representatives of financial institutions and contacting people in other countries through spoofed calls to obtain personal and financial information.

In August, the NCCIA arrested 114 foreign nationals, including 111 Chinese and three Vietnamese citizens, in Islamabad over an alleged cyber-romance and sextortion network operating from a registered IT company.

Separately, the NCCIA has told the Senate Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecommunications that Pakistan currently has no real-time visibility of cyber threats targeting its critical infrastructure, TechJuice reported.

In a report submitted to the committee, the agency said it lacks direct access to a consolidated national threat-intelligence platform or unified threat-landscape dashboard. Security monitoring is handled separately by Security Operations Centres run by individual sectoral regulators and organisations rather than through a centralised system.

The NCCIA warned that the absence of an integrated national threat information-sharing mechanism limits timely situational awareness, early-warning capabilities and coordinated incident response. It called for stronger inter-agency intelligence sharing.

The agency also clarified that it has no authority or technical infrastructure to encrypt government databases, secure network perimeters, mandate cybersecurity training for civil servants, or install intrusion-detection systems on ministry servers. Its role remains investigating criminal breaches after they occur.