Kolkata, Feb 15: Acting information received from confidential sources, West Bengal’s Bidhannagar Police Commissionerate has busted an illegal SIM box racket and arrested a person in connection with the case, police said on Sunday.
Officers of the Commissionerate’s Intelligence Department raided flat number 5B on the fifth floor of a residential building in Hatiara in the Rajarhat area near Kolkata on Saturday and busted the ring.
The items recovered by the team in this search include- 9 SIM box machines, more than 2,500 active SIM cards, multiple keypad mobile and Android devices, networking equipment used for VoIP routing and GSM termination, routers, cables, power units and other accessories.
According to police sources, although it appeared to be a flat for ordinary residents from the outside, sophisticated telecom operations were being run illegally inside.
According to intelligence sources, international calls were being connected to India illegally from that flat. Through the sophisticated SIM box device, VoIP calls coming from abroad were converted into local or domestic calls and sent directly to the Indian network. As a result, the illegal international gateway exchange and telecom regulatory system were being completely bypassed. Due to this, the government was facing a huge revenue loss, according to police sources.
During the raid, the police caught the accused Abir Sheikh alias Monirul Islam Sajib, one of the gang members, red-handed inside the flat. Investigators claimed that the accused was operating multiple SIM box devices in an active state. During the initial interrogation, he confessed to being involved in the racket.
The initial assessment of the police is that this ring may be linked to a larger interstate or international network. The source of financial transactions, the method of collecting SIM cards and who else is involved in it are being investigated.
Bidhannagar Commissionerate officials are interrogating the accused in custody to know more about the ring. An official of the Intelligence Department of the Bidhannagar Commissionerate said: “Such illegal SIM box operations can not only cause loss to telecom revenue but also pose a major threat to national security. A deeper investigation is on to find who else is involved in this.”
–IANS
