KARACHI: Customs officials have allegedly sold hundreds of high-end luxury smuggled vehicles worth billions by illegally declaring them as ‘auctioned vehicles’.
This high-magnitude corruption scandal has jolted the Pakistan customs, as hundreds of high-end luxury smuggled/Non-Duty-Paid (NPD) vehicles worth billions have allegedly been sold illegally by a network involving customs officials, car dealers, and high-influential figures.
According to documents exclusively available to the Custom Bulletin, smuggled/NPD vehicles, which should have been auctioned after paying proper duties and taxes, were instead sold directly in the market in collusion with customs officials.
The scandal came to the surface when the Directorate General of Reforms & Automation (Customs), Karachi, sent an alarming incident report on July 9, 2025, to the Customs Operations Wings (COW), highlighting systematic data manipulation in the WeBOC system.
The report revealed that data manipulation was conducted through user IDs of Assistant Collectors and Deputy Collectors, allowing hundreds of luxury smuggled vehicles to leave customs premises without fulfilling legal obligations.
The Directorate has scrutinized the data of over 1,900 smuggled/ NPD vehicles. Of these, approximately 350 high-end luxury vehicles that were never actually auctioned and had no duties or taxes collected were fraudulently entered as “auctioned vehicles” in the WeBOC system.
Sources confirmed that this was not an isolated incident, suggesting a deep-rooted influential network connected with customs officials from multiple FBR collectorates.
While intelligence departments have put the collectorates in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Faisalabad, and Gujranwala on radar, these vehicles have disappeared from the Multan collectorate, sources informed.
Sources were of the view that this illicit activity was conducted in phases over several months, with vehicles first being removed from customs premises and sold secretly. Subsequently, fake bidder details were entered into the system to create fraudulent auction records, enabling the issuance of customs auction documents required for excise registration, they added.
“This crime was done in phases and took months, but it was astonishingly not noticed,” sources said, pointing to a systematic nature of the corruption.
“Although the COW has directed the concerned collectorates and field formations to expedite the recovery process, no single vehicle could be seized as the department has no mechanism to track and trace the vehicles, which were cleared as auctioned vehicles,” sources said.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that all of these vehicles have now been registered with provincial excise departments against the illegally obtained customs auction documents.
Therefore, these vehicles are now legally registered in provincial excise departments, and any forced confiscation could result in court battles, as these vehicles have now appeared to be owned by ‘genuine buyers’. Although one female Deputy Collector has reportedly been suspended in connection with the case, sources ruled out the possibility that this large-scale scandal involving around 350 vehicles could be facilitated by a single officer.
“The suspended official is being made a scapegoat for what requires a well-organized network spanning multiple levels of the customs hierarchy,” sources said, urging the FBR to address internal systemic issues before launching crackdowns against car dealers and buyers who may have unknowingly purchased these vehicles.
