Illegal exchange with SIM box busted

Vadodara: An illegal telephone exchange that could have been used for terror activities or extortion was busted in Borsad town of Anand.
The local crime branch of Anand police arrested two men, who claim to be caretakers of this exchange set up using four SIM boxes, 61 SIM cards and five wifi routers, on Wednesday. LCB sleuths conducted a raid based on a tip-off and arrested the duo identified as Babar Ali Ansari and his cousin Mir Faisal Ansari. However, the duo said that they were only taking care of the unit in their house for a monthly rent of up to Rs 40,000 while the operator is a man named Jaleel in Dubai.
The pre-activated sim cards found from them were procured from West Bengal and Odisha. Cops suspect that fake documents of real people could have been used to purchase the sim cards.
During interrogation, the two accused said that they set up the exchange after coming in contact with a person through Facebook over a year ago. After they agreed to set up the unit, they received all devices and sim cards through courier and kept the exchange functional for almost a year.
“Through this technology, all international calls can be made to look like local calls, bypassing international rates and make the service provider incur loss. So, there will be loss to public exchequer too and the offence of impersonation is also committed,” said LCB inspector KG Chaudhary.
Police are, however, widening their scope of investigation to find out if the exchange was used for making extortion calls or terror activities. “We are following some leads and also investigating in that direction if any extortion calls were made,” said another police official.
Police said that on getting more information about Jaleel, more details will be unraveled.
The cyber crime cops are further probing the case after an offence of cheating and criminal conspiracy, and violation of Information Technology Act, Indian Telegraph Act and Indian Wireless Telegraph Act was registered at Anand Cyber Crime police station.