Influencer Bobby Kataria arrested for human trafficking

Gurugram:

Social media influencer Balwant Kataria alias Bobby Kataria was arrested on Monday for alleged human trafficking of two youths from Uttar Pradesh, police said.

The case was registered against Kataria under section 370 of the IPC at Bajghera police station in Gurugram, police said.

The complainants, Arun Kumar, a resident of Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh, and Manish Tomar, a resident of Hapur, said they were unemployed. They were in contact with Kataria via Instagram.

The complainants told the police that on Bobby's MBK YouTube channel, they saw an advertisement about a job abroad. Following this, they called Bobby Kataria on his WhatsApp. Bobby called them to meet his office in Sector 109 on the pretext of getting them a job in a foreign country.

The complainant then met Kataria in her office on February 1, 2024 and paid Rs 2,000 for the registration.

After this, at the request of Bobby Kataria, on February 13, Rs 50,000 was transferred to his official account registered in the name of MBK Global Visa Private Limited.

Subsequently, on Bobby's instruction on March 14, another amount of Rs 1 lakh was transferred to the account of a person named Ankit Shaukeen. Kataria sent the tickets to Vientiane (Laos) via Shaukeen's WhatsApp.

On March 28, as instructed by Bobby Kataria, Kumar converted Rs 50,000 into USD at the airport and boarded the flight to Vientiane.

Similarly, thousands of rupees were taken from his friend Manish Tomar on the pretext of sending him to Singapore, but he was also forced to take a flight to Vientiane.

When they both landed at Vientiane airport, they met a young man named Abhi, who described himself as a friend of Bobby Kataria and a Pakistani agent.

He dropped them off at the Mican Son hotel in Vientiane, where they found a young man named Ankit Shaukeen and Nitish Sharma alias Rocky. They took the victims to an unnamed Chinese company. There, the two friends were beaten and their passports were taken from them.

At the same time, they were forced to commit cyber fraud against American citizens. Both were threatened that if the work was not carried out according to their instructions, they would not be able to return to India and would be killed there.

“Around 150 Indians, including women, were brought into this business through human trafficking by brokers like Bobby Kataria on the pretext of jobs. Somehow we escaped from there and reached the Indian embassy and came back to India and lodged a police complaint against Kataria.” the complainant told police.

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