Pakistan is proving to be a heaven for Chinese cybercriminals who have started investing money in establishing illegal businesses in Pakistan. When wandering in the capital and several other cities in the country, you will find some high-profile looking call centers, with armed security guards standing at the doors. You will find great-sounding brand names and well-dressed staff within the offices. But unfortunately, almost all of these call centers are involved in scamming and fraudulent activities using the leaky infrastructure of Pakistan.
As a normal citizen, you are under surveillance and recently, the country has spent a hefty amount in order to purchase a firewall from some Chinese company. Where such firewalls and other frequent restrictions have left the Pakistani entrepreneurs in huge trouble, they are more targeted towards suppressing the public awareness of wrongdoings of powerful institutions in the country. On the other hand, Pakistani infrastructure is being heavily exploited by Chinese bad actors to steal money from not only western people through credit card scams, but they are involved in several gambling campaigns like S9 Game and others that result in a huge amount of money loss from the poor people of Pakistan.
A boy in Rawalpindi, on the condition of anonymity, provided some information regarding his job. He gets paid a lucrative 150K PKR a month from a Chinese call center. He says if you have some good English speaking skills, you are in luck. You go to the office in the morning, and start making uncountable calls to western people. Your goal is to make them fall into tricks by making them believe that this is a call from their bank. The success rate is usually low but it is rewarding. By the end of the day, you are going to scam one or more people.
When the person is fall into trap, your job is done. The task is to get the credit or debit card details. And then using some unknown payment gateway, the cards of the victims are charged.
Not only card scamming, another malicious act of the Chinese people in Pakistan is the exploitation of telecom sector. We are in a country where local citizens are always worrying for their safety and Chinese fraudsters are getting the security and solid shields over their malicious acts. A Chinese guy, who has registered a local business in Pakistan, runs into a telecom franchise in Islamabad, and he takes away 5000 SIM cards. Those SIM cards are then used at SMS verification services used by spammers.
Such a call center was raid by the officials in Islamabad recently but it was soon opened again. The corrupt system in Pakistan allows the Chinese bad actors to bypass the security implications by just spending some money where necessary. If Pakistani government doesn’t take some serious actions against these Chinese scams, it will not only snatch away the local citizens money through gambling programs like S9 Game, but it will also create serious trouble as international, mainly the western people, are being scammed using Pakistani infrastructure.
