Influencer Bobby Kataria Arrested Over Human Trafficking Charges

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

The case has been registered against Kataria under section 370 of the IPC at the Bajghera Police Station Gurugram, police said.

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

The complainants told the police that on Bobby's YouTube channel MBK, they saw an advertisement about abroad-based job. Following this they called Bobby Kataria on 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 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 of 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.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)