There are about 5,000 illegal agents of Mobile Financial Services (MFS) across Bangladesh who have laundered about Tk75,000 crore in the last year.
The agents laundered money through hundi and as a result Bangladesh has been deprived of remittances equivalent to about Tk25,000 crore - which is about $7.8 billion dollars, for the past four months, confirmed The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the police.
CID Chief Additional IGP Mohammad Ali provided the information at a press conference at Malibagh in the capital on Thursday.
CID’s Financial Crime and Cyber Crime units arrested 16 people from Dhaka and Chittagong on Wednesday.
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.
A 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 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 suffer.”
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, Nabin Ullah, 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.
Legal action will be taken against those involved in the money laundering scheme through hundi business, the CID chief added.
