The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Wednesday filed a criminal revision application in a sessions court challenging a judicial magistrate’s order that rejected its plea for grant of physical custody of Armaghan in an “illegal call centre” case.
Armaghan, the main suspect in the Mustafa Amir murder case, has also been booked by the FIA’s Cyber Crime Reporting Centre for his alleged involvement in “harassment, cheating, spoofing, phishing and extortion” through an illegal call centre in Defence Housing Authority.
Investigating officer Ameer Ali Khoso filed the application before District and Sessions Judge (South) Suresh Kumar, requesting him to set aside the judicial magistrate’s April 29 order and grant the custody of the suspect for 14 days so that “fair and impartial investigation may be carried [out] as it is in the prime interest of justice”.
The judge is expected to take up the application on May 2 (Friday). The IO stated in the application that the magistrate failed to consider that sufficient material was available on record, which prima facie connected Armaghan with the commission of the alleged offence that was heinous in nature. He added that without obtaining his physical remand, a proper investigation could not be carried out.
On April 29, Khoso approached the judicial magistrate (South) to obtain the custody of Armaghan, who is in jail, for interrogation. He stated that the new FIR had been lodged against Armaghan on April 16 for allegedly running an illegal call cetnre. He said the suspect was previously arrested by the FIA in a money laundering case, adding that he was interrogated and formally arrested in the present case at the central jail Karachi following a no-objection certificate issued by the administrative judge of anti-terrorism courts.
During interrogation, the IO said that Armaghan admitted to his involvement in running illegal call centre where he used to instruct his agents to impersonate officials and representatives of legitimate entities such as United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and telecommunication providers like AT&T to hoodwink victims into disclosing their sensitive personal and bank data.
He said that the data was subsequently used to facilitate unauthorised financial transactions and the purchase of cryptocurrency. Armaghan had multiple digital wallet accounts, including Binance, Paxful, Noones (under the name Coinfactorypk), and others, the FIA officer said and added that the suspect disclosed that in 2024, he purchased two mining machines from Ishfaq Ahmed for Rs1.8 million with the intention to launch his own digital currency.
He said that Armaghan needed to be further questioned about the use of dark web in illegal activities, cold/paper wallets and identifying accomplices. The suspect had not disclosed complete details regarding payment methods, transaction sources, credentials and logs of digital wallets, spoofed software and associated merchants, as well as the purpose of cryptocurrency mining and sources of dark web access, he added.
