Pakistan’s software industry body has warned that the national crackdown on scam call centers is sweeping up legitimate technology companies, and it is asking the cybercrime agency to change how it raids them.
In a statement on Monday, the Pakistan Software Houses Association, known as P@SHA, said the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency’s campaign against fraud operations has also hit registered software and IT services firms. The association says it supports lawful action against scam centers, which defraud people in Pakistan and abroad and damage the country’s name. Its complaint is about method. Member companies have told the association that agency teams entered offices without showing warrants, held and questioned staff for hours, and took laptops, servers and phones into custody, in some cases at offices where investigators found nothing unlawful. Those are the association’s allegations, reported here as its account; they have not been independently established.
The stakes, the association argues, are export earnings. Pakistan’s IT exports reached a record 4.6 billion dollars in the last fiscal year, a figure the association cites and industry reporting repeats; the government targets 10 billion dollars by fiscal 2029. “Every single dollar is earned on trust,” P@SHA’s chairman, Dr Shoab Ahmed Khan, said. A foreign client who hears that a vendor’s office was raided and its servers taken does not wait for the outcome, he argued; the contract moves to India, the Philippines or Eastern Europe. “Fraudsters may lose a call centre, but Pakistan loses an entire market.”
The crackdown itself is real and large. In late October the agency arrested 89 suspects in a nationwide sweep of illegal call centers, and last week its raid on a Karachi call center picked up 273 people, among them minors, in what investigators described as an international fraud network using spoofed calls to steal card data. A magistrate later ordered many of those detained released, and the allegations in that case remain allegations. The association says the agency itself has noted that some fraud operators register as IT firms, which is exactly why it wants verification before force.
What P@SHA is asking for is process: check a company’s registration with the Pakistan Software Export Board and with the association before a raid, through a named focal person; search under court warrants and agreed procedures; copy data on site instead of removing hardware; return unrelated devices within seven days; and set up a joint committee of the agency, the association, the IT ministry and the export board. It has also asked for a meeting with the IT minister, the Interior Ministry and the agency’s director general, and says it will share the specific cases its members have reported.
The agency had not responded to the association’s statement when the first reports were published on Monday and Tuesday. This story will be updated with its reply.
Transparency note: the raid complaints are P@SHA’s allegations from its Monday statement, carried as claims, not findings. The export figure is the association’s, repeated across industry reporting; it was not separately confirmed with the central bank before publication. The Karachi raid figures are from agency statements and court reporting, and the people detained in that operation have not been convicted of anything.
