There are about 5,000 illegal agents of Mobile Financial Services (MFS) across Bangladesh who were involved in laundering about Tk 75,000 crore last year.
CID Chief Additional IGP Mohammad Ali made this claim at a press conference at Malibagh in the capital on Thursday.
The agents laundered money through hundi and as a result Bangladesh has been deprived of remittances equivalent to about Tk 25,000 crore - which is near $7.8 billion dollars, for the past four months. CID’s Financial Crime and Cyber Crime units arrested 16
people from Dhaka and Chittagong on Wednesday.
The arrestees were identified as Akhter Hossain, 40, Didarul Alam Sumon, 34, Khorshed Alam Emon, 22, Ruman Kanti Das Joy, 34, Rashed Monzoor Firoz, 45, Md Hossainul Kabir, 35, NabinUllah, 37, Md Zunaidul Haque, 30, Adibur Rahman, 25, Asif Newaz, 27, Farhad Hossain, 25, Abdul Basir, 27, Mahbubur Rahman Selim, 50, Abdul Awal Sohag, 36, Fazle Rabbi, 27 and Shamima Akhter, 32.
The remittance earned by the expatriates were not coming to the country, instead, they were being smuggled.
The CID chief said that the illegal agents of mobile banking were divided into three groups for illegal hundi trade.
The first group abroad collects dollars from expatriates and provides dollars to money launderers. The Bangladeshi agents or the second gang distributed the money in local currency to MFS agents.
Later, the MFS agents (third group) paid the rate to MFS numbers of the migrants' realtives.
The owners of black money have been smuggling crores of taka out of the country in this way thereby making Bangladesh lose remittances.
CID Chief Mohammad Ali said: "We found this cycle while investigating the reason for the sudden increase in the price of the dollar in the country. The incomes of expatriates do not come to the country as dollars instead the gang has been smuggling it, making Bangladesh to suffer.”
Legal action will be taken against those involved in the money laundering scheme through hundi business, the CID chief added.
