The South Zone task force police on Sunday busted a call termination racket involving diversion of international calls through mobile networks.
Seven persons were arrested and were identified as Syed Mohammed Ilyas Sha Buqari (33), Mosin Bin Mohammed (44), Mohammed Shahawaz (20), Mohd Omer (26), Mir Muzafar Ali (32), Mohd Zubairuddin (27) and Isa Bin Sayeed (20).
The accused were also found to be using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) to operate the racket from Moghulpura, Tolichowki and Golkonda.
Pak, Gulf link
The gang had allegedly joined hands with some persons operating from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries and most of the calls originated from those places.
The VOIP system enables setting up illegal telephone exchanges that rake in crores of rupees causing massive losses to the government, said S. Chaitanya Kumar, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police, Task Force (South Zone).
“It also poses a severe threat to the country’s security as the original details of the caller are terminated and substituted with the local Internet Protocol (IP) address, thus leaving the caller untraced,” he said.
Mr. Chaitanya Kumar said VOIP enables use of the Internet as transmission media for calls by sending voice data in packets using IP rather than the traditional circuit transmission of Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). “The packets travel like any other type of data over public Internet,” he said.
Through this system, the data is connected to a VOIP gateway that converts it into voice calls, which are disseminated to the receivers.
The process will not leave any trace of the original international number from where the call originated. “By using fake SIM cards the accused were routing calls from different countries, the mobile numbers of which were unable to be traced by local service providers,” he said.
Nine VOIP gateway routers, which can hold up to 16 SIM cards, more than 500 cloned SIM cards, laptops, gateway tenor and mobile phone were seized from them.
Sources said that the easy availability of technology was the biggest factor working in favour of such racketeers and such technology is used by multinational companies by paying taxes to government.
