A Karachi girl rescued before she could harm herself, a father accused of selling videos of his own small children and a string of sextortion cases have pushed online child abuse to the top of Pakistan’s agenda, as experts warn the law is ahead of enforcement.
KARACHI/ISLAMABAD/LAHORE: Pakistan’s cybercrime agency NCCIA says it rescued a 13-year-old Karachi girl who was being pushed by an online group to harm herself, and separately arrested a father accused of recording and selling sexual abuse videos of his own young children, cases that have exposed how quickly online predators can reach Pakistani homes.
The National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency, which took over the cybercrime functions of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), disclosed the cases over the past week. Together with a string of exploitation and blackmail arrests, they have prompted calls from child rights advocates for stronger enforcement, faster trials and far more digital awareness among parents and children.
According to officials quoted by Aaj News and other outlets, the case began with a tip-off from a foreign agency, which shared suspicious online activity and IP addresses linked to a network said to be active in 13 countries, including Pakistan. When investigators traced the Pakistani address, they found its user was not a perpetrator but a victim, a 13-year-old girl in Karachi.
She had been contacted through social media and the contact then moved to a messaging app, NCCIA Additional Director Tariq Nawaz said, according to reports. Unidentified people allegedly set her a series of escalating “tasks”. Officials say the first involved harming a pet and the next would have involved harming herself; the agency reached her before she could do so. NCCIA deputy director, Shehzad Akbar, has reportedly disputed the account that she was told to kill a cat.
The girl’s family was informed, she has received psychological counselling and two devices have been seized for forensic analysis, officials said. No arrests have been announced. Investigators are tracing the accounts used and checking whether other Pakistani children were targeted, and whether the network had local facilitators. Officials have described it as possibly linked to the dark web, but have not confirmed that.
An NCCIA deputy director in Karachi said such groups target vulnerable children and may lure them with money, points or other rewards, and that alerts on suspected child exploitation material are shared through international systems, including software developed in the United Kingdom.
Shahzeb Khanzada explained the ‘dark web’
Explaining the case on his Geo News programme, anchor Shahzeb Khanzada distinguished between the ordinary internet that people reach through Google, YouTube and social media, and parts of the internet that standard search engines do not index. Some of these hidden areas can only be reached with specialised software designed to conceal users’ identities and activities, which makes them attractive for fraud, malware and exploitation. The central questions in the Karachi case, he said, were how the network operated, how the girl was contacted, who was behind it and how she was persuaded.
Child safety experts note that most grooming does not begin on the dark web at all. It typically starts on mainstream social media, gaming platforms and chat apps, where strangers pose as friends before moving children to private or encrypted channels like Telegram.
NCCIA arrest father over child abuse
Days later, on October 25, NCCIA Additional Director Mohammad Shoaib Khan during a press conference in Islamabad told that the agency had arrested a father accused of making and selling sexually explicit videos of his own children, aged about four to six. The material was allegedly sold through private Telegram groups for cryptocurrency, Dawn reported.
“The father who was arrested was making videos of his own children,” Khan said, describing the case as the first of its kind to surface in Pakistan. Investigators said the father was part of a wider network that also circulated videos of animal abuse. The alleged ringleader, from Skardu in Gilgit-Baltistan, was arrested with help from international agencies, and evidence was recovered during operations in Islamabad, Multan and south Punjab. Further raids are under way, according to Geo News. The agency posted Khan’s remarks on its official X account:
Khan also described a separate case in which four suspects allegedly contacted children aged six to 14 on Instagram, lured them with money and distributed abusive videos through WhatsApp groups and overseas networks; investigators reviewed about 60 videos.
In another case, the agency said it traced and arrested a suspect in Islamabad within 13 hours after a minor girl from Karachi complained of prolonged harassment and blackmail. Parents who know of crimes against their children but fail to report them could also face action, the agency warned.
Authorities have not disclosed how many children were involved or named the suspects, and the claims have not yet been tested in court.
Interpol Washington alerts Pakistan
Pakistan has seen such alarms before. In October 2017, at the height of global panic over the so-called “Blue Whale Challenge”, an online “game” blamed for pushing young people through escalating tasks towards self-harm, Interpol Washington alerted Pakistan’s Interpol bureau to related activity. The FIA’s cybercrime wing in Lahore searched Gulshan-e-Ravi and Johar Town before tracing a 14-year-old boy to another address in Johar Town, using GPS data from his mother’s phone, Digital Rights Monitor reported at the time. Officials never said whether he was playing the game or involved in another way.
The international picture has since grown darker. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has repeatedly warned parents about “764” and similar online networks that use manipulation, threats and blackmail to coerce minors into self-harm and abuse through social media, gaming platforms and encrypted apps. In 2024, the BBC reported the case of an eight-year-old who was befriended by a stranger on the gaming platform Roblox, asked for inappropriate images and urged to move to another messaging app, a pattern child safety groups say is common.
The new cases land weeks after a major study showed how widespread the problem is. The Disrupting Harm in Pakistan research by UNICEF, ECPAT International and INTERPOL, released in September, found that nearly one in 16 internet-using children aged 12 to 17, about 1.5 million children, had experienced at least one form of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse in a year. More than half told no one, none reported through police, social workers or helplines, and in 85% of cases the perpetrator was someone the child already knew. Social media accounted for 44% of incidents, and sextortion and AI-generated abusive images were flagged as emerging threats.
Offline abuse figures in Punjab point the same way. Child sexual abuse cases in Lahore rose 20% according to police records, police have made multiple arrests in a single day, and 32 children were killed after sexual abuse in Punjab over two years. Lahore’s police chief this week reported that abduction cases of women kept rising even as overall crime fell.
Advocates stress need of digital literacy
Child rights advocates say the law is ahead of enforcement. Pakistan’s Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 criminalises child sexual abuse material and online grooming, but cases are slowed by limited technical expertise, poor handling of digital evidence and slow trials, a Lahore High Court lawyer told the media. Policy consultant Noureen Akhter said exploitation often happens inside homes, sometimes with a parent’s complicity, and called for funded district-level cybercrime units and forensic labs. Child rights activist Hameed Alwani said the cases had “exposed gaps in parental supervision, digital literacy, public awareness and child protection”.
The government has made commitments. At a national dialogue on October 12, co-hosted by the Ministry of Human Rights, Punjab’s Child Protection and Welfare Bureau, UNICEF and UNFPA, officials pledged to merge child helplines into a single national number, 1121, push broadcasters to air child-protection messages, create 90-day fast-track courts and add digital literacy to school curricula. A review by Minute Mirror ten days later found that only the 1121 notification had been completed; the rest, including the courts, remained on paper, while about 12,000 forensic cases were pending in Punjab.
The NCCIA says it will run awareness campaigns in schools and universities, beginning in Islamabad. Experts advise parents to keep devices in shared spaces for younger children, use platform parental controls and privacy settings, know which games and apps their children use, and above all talk to them regularly so they feel safe reporting anything that frightens them. Warning signs include secrecy about online contacts, sudden withdrawal, new “friends” offering gifts or game credits, and requests to move conversations to private apps. Children should be told that no one online has the right to demand secrets, images or dangerous “challenges”, and that they will not be punished for telling.
As schools push AI and digital skills and children spend more time on screens, researchers have also noted the strain on parents trying to keep up. In Lahore, the NCCIA and Punjab police have already made arrests in cyber harassment and blackmail cases, and the Islamabad unit recently arrested a suspect in a blackmail and extortion case.
How and Where to report
Cybercrimes against children can be reported to the NCCIA helpline 1799 or through its online complaint portal https://complaint.nccia.gov.pk/, and child protection concerns to the national helpline 1121. In an emergency, call 15.
Officials say the most important step is the one most children never take: telling an adult. In the Karachi case, it was a foreign alert, not a report from home, that reached a girl in time. The next child may not be so lucky.
If you or a child you know is struggling or at risk of self-harm, please reach out to a trusted adult or a mental health professional; support is available, and you do not have to face it alone.
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