MYSURU: CCB sleuths have unearthed a SIM box fraud and arrested a Kerala-based man who was running the illegal telephone exchange at a rented house in Mysuru. According to city police, Shameem was running the illegal telephone exchange using the SIM box and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology which helped him route international calls as local calls.
Based on a tip-off and information received about the racket, the CCB sleuths raided the house of the accused and seized over four SIM boxes having 32 ports each along with several cellphones, computers, Wi-Fi routers with SIM slots and modems.
During the interrogation, the accused confessed to committing the crime and have revealed that over 500 SIMs were used to route international calls as local ones to bypass international call rates and tariff charged by network operators.
“Through this set up, the accused person used SIM boxes and VoIP technology to route international calls and made it look like a local call, thereby bypassing international rates making the service provider incur losses. They would earn based on the differences between local and international tariffs,” said Dr Chandragupta, Mysuru City Police Commissioner.
He said that fraudster might have teamed up with a foreign partner to route these calls through the Internet and then make it look like a local call. When asked if there would be a leak of any private information, the commissioner said there would be a possibility of it but we are not sure.
“This fraud is a billion-dollar industry worldwide and we have to go back searching about the involvement of any partner. We have a lot of technicalities involved in it and the CCB team is looking into all angles and ascertaining more details,” he said.
Sources revealed that police were looking into the aspect if any call centre who work for foreign companies were making use of these facilities to route the international call. The police is also probing whether the system was used for criminal activities as the fraud could also pose a risk to the national security. The police have booked a case against him at the NR Police station.