3 YouTubers held for promoting online gambling

The Detective Branch of police claimed to have arrested three YouTubers for promoting online gambling advertisements in their video contents. The arrestees are Prottoy Heron, 22, Rayhan Sarker Bishal, 22, and Abdul Hamid, 22.

They were arrested from different areas in Narayanganj and Dhaka last week.

They were publicising the gambling content for the last three years, Mohammad Tarek Bin Rashid, cyber and special crime (north) deputy commissioner of DB, told The Daily Star.

For each advertisement, they used to get Tk 70,000 to Tk 1.10 lakh, he added.

Prottoy’s YouTube channel “The Ajaira LTD” has 4.64 million subscribers. Some of their videos have views ranging from 5 million to 38 million.

Ajaira LTD has an online web series “Bodmaish Polapain”. Online gambling advertisements were being publicised in each episode of season-4 of the web series, said the DB official. Prottoy and Rayhan also acted in the web series.

Besides, Hamid has his own YouTube channel named “Hamid Mals”, which has more than 70,000 subscribers.

The DB official said Hamid used to coordinate the link between the gambling agents and YouTubers in Bangladesh. The gambling agents sent links of their targeted YouTubers with whom Hamid used to contact for the promotion of the gambling websites.

By sending screenshots of the advertisement, Hamid used to receive the payment.

Money used to be transacted through banking and other non-banking channels, the official said, adding that they are investigating the matter.

A case was filed with Ramna Police Station in this connection.