LUCKNOW A team of Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) busted an illegal Internet calling and international telephone exchange racket in city’s Kalyanpur locality on Saturday. Following a tip-off, the ATS sleuths carried out a comprehensive search on the third floor of residential apartment under Gudamba police station limits. The search, which started on Saturday, went on for around 24 hours.
While the ATS officials refused to share details before gathering all evidence, a source privy to the development stated that the team reached RD Apartments in Subash Nagar colony of Gudamba’s Kalyanpur locality on Saturday evening. The team members, who arrived in four vehicles, created a perimeter around the apartment before heading towards a flat on the third floor. During the raid, which continued till late Sunday afternoon, several documents and equipment were seized from the flat. The team also took a few people into custody. They are being interrogated by ATS sleuths, the source added.
Last year, a similar racket was unearthed from the Jankipuram colony, which is merely five kilometres away from the apartment that was raided on Saturday. During the previous raid in Jankipuram, two persons were arrested by the U.P. ATS. The accused duo was involved in issuing threats to VVIPs through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls. They caused a national threat by operating illegal telephone exchange by converting international calls into local ones.
The source added the ATS sleuths seized equipment, including three VOIP multi-SIM gateways, 183 pre-activated SIM cards, three modem routers, a tablet, Internet port, a data connector power station cable, and other peripheral devices used for operating the illegal telephone exchange.
{{/usCountry}}The source added the ATS sleuths seized equipment, including three VOIP multi-SIM gateways, 183 pre-activated SIM cards, three modem routers, a tablet, Internet port, a data connector power station cable, and other peripheral devices used for operating the illegal telephone exchange.
{{/usCountry}}How an illegal telephone exchange operates?
The calls generating from other countries are received on SIM boxes and then converted to local calls with the help of modem routers before transferring them to local mobile numbers at different places in the country. With this trick, the receivers’ mobile phones display local numbers as the calls are routed through illegal telephone exchanges. The racketeers also manage to skip the national gateway through which calls originating from other countries are routed to different locations in the country. Therefore, they do not get easily traced while carrying out a criminal or a terror activity.