Tuesday, Jan 25, 2005
Tuesday, Jan 25, 2005 |
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Chennai
By Karthik Subramanian
CHENNAI, JAN. 24. The lure of easy money using advanced technology landed two engineering graduates in prison on Monday, when the Telecom Monitoring Cell and City Crime Branch cracked an illegal long distance telephony racket. Police identified the accused as Krishna Reddy (24), a resident of Thiruverkadu, and Mohammed Baig (23), from Ongole, Andhra Pradesh. The two have been remanded to judicial custody and face charges under the Indian Penal Code for cheating and criminal conspiracy, and under the Indian Telegraph Act for maintaining an unauthorised network. Police are also searching for the main accused.
Losses in crores
Reddy and Baig were arrested from a commercial complex on R.K. Mutt Road in Mylapore from where they were operating. Equipment used for routing long distance calls, including routers and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) carriers, were confiscated. Investigators said the racket could have been in operation for more than two years. Losses to the service providers and the Government could run into several crores. This is the fourth such case being busted in the city since January 1. The Telecom Monitoring Services Cell, an independent body constituted by the Department of Telecommunications to monitor grey market long distance calls, has filed the cases.
Chennai ranks third in a list of cities with illegally routed calls. Apart from monetary losses, the illegal networks also raise serious security concerns.
The call route
A person receiving an international call through the illegal network could be oblivious of the route the call takes.
The racketeers tie up with service providers or with similar racketeers abroad and receive the voice calls over the Internet as data packets using VoIP carriers. In this case, as in the three other cases busted this month, the illegal operators used high speed 512 kilobits per second (kbps) broadband connections to receive the voice packets. These packets were then transformed into the voice and sent to the receivers through landlines, in this case Reliance and BSNL lines.
The Telecom Monitoring Cell has set up a toll-free hotline, 1600 110420, which people can call to provide information about dubious calls. S. Sivaprakasam, Deputy Director General of Vigilance and Telecom Monitoring, said they had received a complaint from a Reliance mobile user who found it strange that he was talking to a relative abroad while his mobile showed a local phone number.
The next step of investigation was to determine where the calls came from. Telecom officials told the City Crime Branch that an unusually high number of outgoing calls were being made from an office in Mandaveli. The City Crime Branch inspector, K.S. Murali, who headed the investigation, said further investigations were likely to reveal more information about racketeers using technology to exploit the system.
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