Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) has rescued a 13-year-old girl in Karachi who investigators say was being drawn into a suspected dark web-linked network that assigned children dangerous “tasks” through social media and messaging apps. The rescue, in the city’s Rabia City neighbourhood, followed a tip-off from an international intelligence agency that shared suspicious IP addresses active in 13 countries, including Pakistan.
Investigators tracing the Pakistani address initially believed they were hunting a suspect. Instead, they found a victim: a schoolgirl contacted under concealed identities who, officials say, was being psychologically groomed step by step. Her father was informed, and the two devices she used were seized with his cooperation for forensic examination. Her parents told officials they had noticed changes in her behaviour over the past six months but had never connected them to her life online.
Additional Director Tariq Nawaz said the group had given the girl a first task — poisoning a cat, which she carried out — and then instructed her to seriously harm herself; NCCIA officers reached her before she could act on the second instruction. Nawaz added that two or three further victims have been identified and that investigators are checking whether other children in Pakistan were targeted. No arrests have been announced in the girl’s case.
But the agency’s own account is not fully settled. Deputy Director Shehzad Akbar, at a press conference, rejected the suggestion that the first task involved killing a cat. He said the child had been subjected to psychological manipulation similar to tactics used by dark web groups internationally, and warned that the situation “could have become more serious” had the network not been exposed.
The wider investigation is considerably larger than one rescue. Officials say 42 suspects, including 12 juveniles, are under investigation. Three Karachi design firms — Pixel Craft, Art Office and Art Design — have been searched and 41 mobile phones seized between them; investigators are examining suspected links to individuals in Germany and the United Kingdom, claims that children were paid around $100 to produce explicit animated content, and the possible use of so-called “red rooms” on the dark web to assign tasks to minors. A man identified as Fudan is alleged to have operated the network. Those claims remain under investigation and no charges have been announced.
The case matters well beyond Karachi because the trail that led to the girl began with IP addresses in 13 countries — a reminder that online grooming networks operate across borders faster than any single country’s police force. It also lands on a familiar blind spot: the contact unfolded not on some obscure corner of the internet but inside ordinary apps, in a home where the parents saw the warning signs — six months of changed behaviour — without recognising them. The NCCIA has urged parents to monitor children’s online activity and to ask who they are talking to. How thin the line is between a routine click and a criminal investigation is something we have covered before: how a single phishing email exposed 1.3 million people in Arizona’s court system.
