Nepal Police continues raids against call centres owned by Chinese

Kathmandu: Nepal Police has continued its raids against illegal call centres owned by Chinese nationals.

On Wednesday night, a raid was conducted at a call centre in Kathmandu’s Thamel area following which four Chinese nationals were arrested.

The raid in Thamel, a popular tourist area, was the fourth to be carried out within a week.

On Monday, the police conducted raids in two call centres occupied by Chinese nationals whose owner was an Indian national too.

On Sunday, on a similar kind of raid was carried out in Butwal near Nepal-India border, leading to the arrest of Chinese and Indian nationals.

Police also seized 26 laptops, 472 mobile phones, recharge cards worth Rs 190,000, 20 SIM cards, and other equipment from the Chinese nationals.

The Chinese nationals were operating a call centre in Kathmandu and illegally providing loans to Indian citizens at high-interest rates.

According to the police, thousands of Indian citizens including Nepalis have been cheated by this call centre.

The police informed that the gang had been running a fraud business for months sending messages through social media saying that they have won a lottery, hacking other people’s social networks including Facebook, and asking for a certain amount of money to collect lottery tickets and goods.

The police are now investigating using the details they got from the laptop, desktop, CPU, mobile, pen drive, various hard disks, iPads.

After the arrest, Indian citizen Niranjan Kumar stated that their head office is in China and they also have call centres in Kathmandu, Pokhara and Chitwan.

The Nepal Police, on December 23, 2019, arrested 122 Chinese nationals from all over the Kathmandu Valley.

The operation, the largest one against any foreign nationals in Nepal’s history, apparently continues and at least 800 more Chinese nationals are being watched currently.