A special team of the City Police arrested 36-year-old K. Rangasamy from Tuticorin District, accused of making 4,000 crank calls to the City Police control room during the past six months.
Police said Rangasamy would speak only if the operator at the control room was a woman and would then engage in romantic and sometimes obscene talk.
If the caller at the other end was a man, Rangasamy would provide false information about burglaries and accidents in the city.
A special team led by Sub-Inspector S. Chandramohan was formed.
Tracked
The team tracked the caller to Tuticorin and Rangasamy was nabbed even as he was making another crank call. Enquiries revealed that he was in the practice of calling up the control room's toll free number.
An official at the control room lamented that a system, put in place to provide emergency service to people in need and in distress, was misused by many, wasting the time of police personnel on duty. The seven operators who worked in three shifts at the control room underwent a lot of stress and would not be able to render their best service if they had to attend to such crank calls, police said.
City Police Commissioner Amaresh Pujari said that persons making these kinds of mischievous calls would be prosecuted.
Mr. Pujari said that the police control room received over 1,000 calls every day of which more than 50 per cent were crank calls.
Now a new system has been introduced that would not allow these callers to go scot-free.
Discussions
He also said that recent discussions with mobile phone service operators have resulted in the stoppage of calls from other districts to the control room after modifications were made in their switching equipment of the service providers.
