How to Report a Cybercrime in Pakistan (2025)
Someone cloned your Facebook profile and is asking your relatives for money. A WhatsApp number is blackmailing a friend over old photos. A "bank officer" on the phone just walked your father out of his savings. In every one of these, the first official stop is the same: the FIA's Cyber Crime Wing. Here is exactly how the complaint works in 2025, from evidence to follow-up.
Before you touch the portal
The complaint lives or dies on what you can attach. Screenshots of the chats, posts or emails, with URLs visible — not just a profile name. The exact link to the fake profile or phishing site. Transaction slips if money moved. The numbers involved. Your CNIC copy. And one discipline that outweighs everything: don't delete, don't block, don't "clean up" anything before the complaint is filed. The offending account going dark can end an investigation before it begins.
Lodging it online
Go to complaint.fia.gov.pk and choose to lodge a new complaint. You give your name, CNIC, address and contact, then the incident itself — dates, platform, what happened, in plain chronological order. Upload the evidence as PDF or JPG, each file under 2 MB, so compress the screenshots if you must. Submit, and the tracking ID arrives by SMS and email within minutes. Write it down twice.
The legal basis is the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, and harassment, impersonation, financial fraud, hacking, blackmail and fake accounts all sit inside it — the intake form's category list will hold your case.
No internet, or an emergency?
The 1991 hotline is the Cyber Crime Wing's own number, staffed round the clock; the duty officer tells you whether to file online, in person, or with the banking-crime side for pure financial fraud. For detailed queries there is [email protected], and every region has a walk-in Cybercrime Reporting Centre — Islamabad HQ on 051-9106384, Lahore on 042-99268527, Karachi on 021-99333950, Peshawar on 091-9216251. Every channel issues the same style of tracking ID.
After you file
An officer should contact you within a couple of working days to verify the complaint. Keep the tracking ID and use the portal's complaint-tracking page for status; if the line goes quiet, quoting the ID on 1991 finds the right desk again. FIA takedowns of fake profiles can take a fortnight, so also report the profile inside the app itself, in parallel — let both machines run at once.
One thought while you screenshot your evidence: in Gaza, the internet itself gets switched off as a weapon — the ability to report anything at all is worth a moment's recognition.
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