Haryana Police on Monday arrested social media influencer Balwant Kataria alias Bobby Kataria for allegedly human trafficking of two Uttar Pradesh youths. Kataria was arrested following a joint raid at his residence in Gurugram’s Sector-109.
During the raids, several suspicious documents and a huge stash of cash were reportedly recovered. A case has been registered against Kataria under section 370 (offence of trafficking) of the IPC at the Bajghera Police Station in Gurugram, police said.
Police Action Against YouTuber
The police action came after two youths from Uttar Pradesh filed complaints that Karatia trafficked them to Laos and forced them into cyber fraud operations.
The complainants, Arun Kumar, a resident of Fatehpur and Manish Tomar, a resident of Hapur, said that they were unemployed and came in touch with Kataria via Instagram.
According to the complainants, they saw an advertisement about the abroad-based job on Bobby’s YouTube channel MBK, following which they approached the YouTuber via 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 his office on 1 February 2024 and paid Rs 2,000 for registration.
After this, on the request of Bobby Kataria, on February 13, Rs 50,000 was transferred to his official account which was registered in the name of MBK Global Visa Private Limited.
Thereafter, 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) through Shaukeen’s WhatsApp.
On March 28, as per the instructions of Bobby Kataria, Kumar got Rs 50,000 converted into USD at the airport and boarded the flight to Vientiane.
Similarly, lakhs of rupees were taken from his friend Manish Tomar on the pretext of sending him to Singapore, but he was also made to board a flight to Vientiane.
When both of them 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 Hotel Mican Son in Vientiane, where they found a young man named Ankit Shaukeen and Nitish Sharma alias Rocky. They took the victims to an anonymous Chinese company. There both the friends were severely beaten and their passports were snatched.
At the same time, they were forced to commit cyber fraud against US citizens. Both of them were threatened that if the work was not done as per their instructions then they would not be able to return to India and they would be killed there.
“About 150 Indians including women were brought into that company 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 filed a police complaint against Kataria,” the complainant told the police.
Who Is Bobby Kataria?
Karatia is not new to controversies. In 2022, an FIR was registered against him for allegedly posting obscene remarks about a woman on social media and threatening her.
The same year, he was arrested for allegedly smoking on a flight. Later the bodybuilder again faced flak after a video of him went viral where he was seen drinking in the middle of the road in Uttarakhand.
(With IANS Inputs)
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