New Delhi, Delhi Police on Friday arrested four men for allegedly running an illegal international telephone exchange, which they said had cost a loss of Rs 103 crore to the government.
Police received a complaint from the telecom department that it had received input regarding running of illegal international telecom setup in Delhi’s Chawri Bazar and calls from USA, UAE, Canada, Nepal, Australia, Pakistan and other foreign countries were being termonated illegally to Indian telephone or mobile numbers.
The illegal international GSM termination exchanges were set up using SIP trunk, Internet and server-based technologies. The setups were illegally terminating foreign calls in India, bypassing the legal international and national gateways of Indian telecom service providers.
The Caller Line Identification (CLI) used to display Indian numbers for the internationally landed calls. In this manner, a huge number of calls went unregulated, causing massive loss of revenues and compromising national security of India.
On the basis of complaint, a case was registered under Telegraph Act at Hauz Qazi Police Station and the case was investigated by district Cyber Cell. During the course of investigation, one accused, Imran Khan, was arrested in February this year and he was sent to judicial custody. This was followed by the trail of illegal servers running on the spot was traced on September 29, and another accomplice was arrested, who had installed the software through which the international calls were routed on the local numbers of citizens. Apart from this, on September 29, one more accused was arrested, who was the sole proprietor under which name the illegal setup was found registered. On the instance of the above arrested accused, on September 30, two more accused were also arrested in the case.
The accused have been identified as Irfan Ali, Zulfiqar Ali, Areeb Ali and Mohd Irfan alias Rajji, who is the mastermind of the syndicate, said Shweta Chauhan, DCP, Central Delhi.