Banking court grants bail to mobile fraud suspect

A banking court on Wednesday granted bail to a suspect accused of defrauding a man of Rs2 million by obtaining his bank account details over the phone while impersonating a security agency official.

The judge set the bail of Muhammad Imran, who was arrested by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) from Gujranwala, at Rs200,000 and asked him to hand over his passport so he could not escape his trial.

The FIA claims that Imran and his accomplices, identified as Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad Aslam and Rehman, who are yet to be arrested, defrauded Binte Khan, a Karachi resident hailing from Waziristan, by impersonating security agency officials to seek his personal details.

According to Khan, he received a phone call from an unknown number on September 29 and the caller identified himself as an intelligence agency official collecting personal details of internally displaced persons like him, threatening him with bulldozing his house in his native town if he failed to comply. The next, he said, he found out that Rs2 million had been withdrawn from his bank account.

An FIA representative told the court that the agency’s investigation had revealed that Rs1 million of the looted money was transferred to an account registered in a woman’s name in Jhang while the rest was withdrawn from at least 25 mobile money transfer franchises in Bahawalnagar.

In his defence, Imran maintained that he had nothing to do with the fraud, as he ran such a franchise where people would come to send and receive money within the country.