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Telephone exchange scam
Illegal telephone exchange used Canadian technology
Indian police are investigating an illegal telephone exchange that was set up with stolen technology produced by a Canadian company.
Two people have been arrested on charges of running the illegal telephone exchange in northwest Delhi, the police said.
Delhi Police’s special cell nabbed Sanjay Rajvanshi and Satya Patnaik for allegedly running an illegal international long-distance (ILD) telephone exchange at their company N.G. Softech Pvt. Ltd in Sector-14 of Rohini.
The police said they recovered from the company office one VOIP gateway-cum-GSM channel bank with 128 SIM cards (60 SIMs of Hutch and 68 SIMs of Airtel), 30 unused Airtel SIM cards, three used Airtel cards, one internet broad band router, one ADSL router, one ethernet switch, eight external antennas and other articles required for running the exchange.
Deputy Commissioner of Police Alok Kumar said the two men in their interrogation revealed that N.G. Softech had procured and installed this illegal exchange from Cistel Technology, Canada and Nelo telecom, U.S.
The police official said the duo and others involved in operating the exchange were bypassing the authorized channel of the licensed service providers and were causing huge loss to the government.
India’s state-run telecommunication firm is facing competition from a raft of these illegal telephone exchanges, some 200 of which have been detected across the country over the past six years.
Police believe these kinds of exchanges — operated from little cubicles or private residences or shops — are costing the government over a billion dollars a year.
The first illegal exchange was detected in Mumbai in 1998.
Since then hundreds of such operations have been busted across the country.
The illegal exchanges bypass the network of authorized providers, which facilitate international phone calls in the country, and get a fixed commission from each incoming call made through the illegal network.
Apart from causing financial losses to the exchequer, the illegal exchanges are seen as security threats.
In many cases, the owners of illegal exchanges have a tie in with legitimate operators, mostly in the U.S. and Europe.
These offshore operators help customers call India at very cheap rates and issue pre-paid cards.
The latest bust in New Delhi was a fairly elaborate set-up using Canada’s Cistel technology.
Cistel was founded by Indo-Canadian engineer Nishith Goel. The Ottawa-based company is ranked as one of the top 250 Canadian Technology companies, with a 37 per cent revenue increase from $10.5-million in 2005 to $13-million in 2006.
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