Fourteen people, including 12 foreigners, have been arrested in Bangladesh for duping people on social networking sites, two weeks after a westerner and three bank officials were held for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars by manipulating ATMs.
Bangladesh's elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said they arrested 14 people, 12 of them foreigners, on charges of cheating people through the Internet.
"They are members of an international cyber fraud gang. They were stealing money cheating people by using social network sites. We arrested them last night," an RAB spokesman said.
He said 12 of them were foreign nationals - eight from Nigeria, three from Cameroon, and one from Congo - but the spokesman declined to elaborate further.
Mobile phones, laptops and dollars were seized from them.
The development came two weeks after Bangladesh police arrested a westerner and three officials of a private bank on charges of embezzling millions of dollars by manipulating ATMs in the capital Dhaka.
The fraudulence forced banks to take precautionary measures, including temporarily shutting down transactions through the national payment switch (NPS), to safeguard the interests of clients.
After the arrests linked to the ATM fraud, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal had said that authorities were keeping an eye foreign nationals in Bangladesh.
Last month, police said they kept five foreigners under vigilance for suspected involvement in cyber crimes.
