By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani authorities have arrested a man accused of running a counterfeit postage operation that allegedly cost the US Postal Service more than $126m, the country’s cybercrime agency has said.
Faheem Akram, 33, from Khanewal in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Florida last month over LabelsBank.com, a website that US prosecutors say sold more than 5.1 million counterfeit shipping labels to thousands of customers. The site has since been seized and shut down.
The National Cyber Crimes Investigation Agency (NCCIA) said on Tuesday that Akram was arrested during what it called a “specialized locator operation”, which lasted 10 days and involved the questioning of 47 people and the analysis of 122 call records. It did not say where or in what circumstances he was taken into custody.
“The accused had been selling fake stamps via a fraudulent website since 2023,” the agency said in a statement. “Sixteen bank accounts belonging to the accused’s family were used to facilitate the fraud.”
The NCCIA said a case had been registered and that further investigations were under way. “We maintain a zero-tolerance policy against those involved in cybercrimes and digital fraud,” it added. It was not immediately clear what the arrest would mean for the US case.
According to court records cited by the US Justice Department, Akram operated LabelsBank.com, which allegedly sold counterfeit US postage at a fixed price, typically $2 a label, regardless of a package’s weight, size or destination. The website was not authorised to sell Postal Service products or services.
Postal inspectors said more than 5,200 customers used the site to buy upwards of 5.1 million counterfeit labels. By allowing parcels to be shipped at heavily discounted rates, the operation allegedly caused more than $126m in lost revenue and shipping costs to the postal service.
Jason Reding Quiñones, the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, described the alleged scheme as “simple but massive”. The Postal Service obtained a court order to seize the domain in connection with the indictment.
The case was investigated by the Miami division of the US Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), the federal law enforcement agency responsible for crimes involving the US mail system. “Our reach goes beyond our borders,” said Bladismir Rojo, the division’s inspector in charge.
The Justice Department’s announcement of the charges did not say whether Akram was in US custody or had entered a plea. The USPIS subsequently issued a wanted notice for him and offered a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to his arrest and conviction, while warning members of the public not to try to apprehend him themselves.
Akram faces one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to make and sell counterfeit postage stamps, five counts of making and selling counterfeit postage labels, and four counts of wire fraud.
If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison on the conspiracy and counterfeit-postage counts, and up to 20 years on each wire-fraud count, according to the Justice Department. An indictment contains allegations, and Akram is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
Postal inspectors have warned that counterfeit postage schemes are proliferating, with fake labels turning up on packages linked to reshipping scams, according to the trade publication FreightWaves. The inspection service also cautions that buying postage from third-party websites is risky because there is no way for a buyer to verify it is genuine.
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