Sri Lanka Police arrested 74 Vietnamese nationals during a raid at a housing complex in Uttarananda Mawatha, Kollupitiya on Wednesday evening, the second large detention at the same address in the space of a few hours.
Kollupitiya Police said the suspects — 41 men and 33 women aged between 19 and 39 — had been running financial scams while staying in the country in breach of their visa conditions. Investigations are continuing.
The latest arrests follow a separate operation earlier on Wednesday afternoon in which 60 foreign nationals were taken into custody at a building in the same Kollupitiya area over suspected computer-related crimes. Together the two raids bring the confirmed cybercrime-suspect tally from the Kollupitiya cluster to more than 130 in a single day.
In a parallel operation on Wednesday night, the Matara Divisional Crime Detective Bureau arrested six more foreign nationals — including one woman — at a hotel in the Talalla area of Gandara. Police said the group, made up of Taiwanese and Chinese nationals aged 25 to 40, had been operating businesses on tourist visas. Foreign cigarettes were also recovered.
The crackdown extends a fast-widening enforcement campaign that began in Western Province suburbs. In the previous three days, 157 suspects of nine nationalities were detained in Rajagiriya, Medawelikada Road and Talangama, with 120 remanded in custody and 37 Chinese nationals deported on Monday night.
NewsFirst’s investigation published Tuesday traced the influx to organised online-fraud syndicates previously based in Myanmar’s Myawaddy region, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, which appear to be relocating operations to Sri Lanka. Wednesday’s expansion into the Vietnamese cohort, and the parallel Matara hotel raid, suggest the recruitment networks are no longer confined to a single nationality or to Colombo’s eastern suburbs.
Source: Ada Derana.
