Bangladesh police raid Dhaka iGaming and fraud ring moving up to $20 million a month

Officers from the Cyber unit of Dhaka Metropolitan Police’s Detective Branch conducted the raid, describing several floors of the building as dedicated exclusively to running the operation. The equipment count tells its own story: 14 laptops and 16 phones against a stockpile of more than 6,000 SIM cards, alongside 20 GSM gateways built for internet telephony and roughly $1,700 in cash. That works out to roughly 200 SIM cards for every laptop or phone recovered, a split that only makes sense if the goal was blasting messages at industrial scale rather than a handful of people running manual conversations. All four detainees now face formal charges.

Investigators describe a two-part setup. Gambling sites did the actual work of moving money, serving as the financial backbone of the operation. Getting users onto those sites relied on a simpler hook: mass SMS blasts promising jobs, extra income, or promotional deals, with links that routed anyone who clicked straight to a gaming or financial platform primed to pull them into making a deposit. Recruiting victims through fake job and income offers is a tactic that has turned up again and again in scam operations across South and Southeast Asia, and gambling platforms specifically tend to serve as the money-moving layer because deposits and withdrawals through a betting account put distance between a victim’s funds and whoever ultimately collects them.

The GSM gateways did double duty. Each one could juggle 12 SIM cards simultaneously, which meant a handful of devices could blast messages to enormous numbers of phone numbers while leaving investigators with far less physical hardware to trace back to the people running it. Scaled up, the monthly transfer estimate alone works out to something like $200 million to $240 million a year moving through this single node before police shut it down.