Pakistan’s software industry has asked the country’s cybercrime investigators to stop treating genuine technology companies as if they were fraud operations, warning that heavy-handed raids are frightening away the foreign clients behind IT exports.
The Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT and ITES, known as P@SHA, said a growing number of legitimate software houses and IT-enabled services firms have been raided by the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency during its crackdown on scam centres. It wants the agency to tell genuine technology companies apart from criminal fraud operations.
P@SHA was careful to say the industry stands firmly with the law and backs the fight against cybercrime and the networks that defraud people at home and abroad. But the work must follow a clearly defined legal framework, with due process, transparency and a sense of proportion. Enforcement that damages honest businesses or cuts off access to the equipment they need does real harm to the technology ecosystem.
The association said member companies had described a pattern that goes well beyond ordinary investigation. Agency teams, it said, have entered offices without showing a warrant, kept employees sitting for hours of questioning, and carried away laptops, servers and mobile phones even when nothing unlawful was found. That interrupts client services and puts confidential foreign customer data at risk.
That fear matters because the IT sector is one of the few parts of Pakistan’s economy growing steadily, at around 20 percent a year. IT exports hit a record 4.6 billion dollars in 2025-26, up from 3.8 billion dollars the year before. The government has set a target of 10 billion dollars by 2028-29 under its Uraan Pakistan programme, alongside a wider goal of 15 billion dollars.
“Every single dollar is earned on trust,” said Dr Shoab Ahmed Khan, the chairman of P@SHA. “A foreign client who hears that his vendor’s office was raided and its servers taken away does not wait for the forensic report. He moves the contract to India, the Philippines or Eastern Europe. The fraudsters lose a call centre, but Pakistan loses a market.”
The stakes go beyond the companies themselves. Pakistan produces more than 70,000 computing graduates every year, and families spend their savings on degrees built around what the industry needs. The IT ministry, the Software Export Board, Ignite, the State Bank and the Higher Education Commission all work towards those targets. P@SHA warned that careless raids could undo much of that effort and push skilled young professionals to look for work abroad. The NCCIA itself has acknowledged that some fraud operators register as IT companies, which makes careful checks before a raid all the more important.
What P@SHA Wants Changed
P@SHA has set out measures it wants the NCCIA to adopt. First, every search should be carried out under a court-issued warrant shown to the company at the start, in line with the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 and the Code of Criminal Procedure. Employees, women in particular, should be treated with respect. Second, before acting against a registered company, the agency should check its standing with the Pakistan Software Export Board and with P@SHA, through round-the-clock contact persons.
Third, where evidence is genuinely needed, forensic copies should be made on the premises instead of seizing whole systems, and unrelated equipment should be handed back within seven days, with a proper seizure memo. Fourth, foreign client data must be handled under strict chain-of-custody rules, and companies should not be presented in public as criminal enterprises before forensic findings are available and formal charges have been filed.
P@SHA has also proposed a permanent joint committee bringing together the NCCIA, the Ministry of IT and Telecom, the Pakistan Software Export Board and the association itself, to handle complaints, share intelligence about scam operators and agree procedures for raids on registered IT companies. It also wants an end to the harassment and mistreatment it says sometimes accompanies these operations.
“We will work hand in hand with NCCIA to root out the scam networks that give our country a bad name,” Dr Shoab Ahmed Khan added. “We only ask that the law be enforced with precision, so that the honest majority of the IT industry is protected, not punished.”
The association has asked for an urgent joint meeting with the Minister for IT and Telecom, the Interior Ministry and the Director General of the NCCIA, and said it would share the specific cases reported by its members with the relevant authorities. The technology sector, it said, cannot grow while businesses remain uncertain about whether their operations, people and equipment could face disruptive action without transparent procedures.
The dispute captures a tension at the heart of Pakistan’s digital policy. The country badly needs the scam centres shut down, because the fraud they commit damages its reputation and hurts legitimate exporters. At the same time, those exporters are building an industry the government itself has made a national priority, and every contract lost abroad is hard to win back. The industry’s message is not that enforcement should stop, but that it should be precise enough to hit criminals and spare everyone else.
