Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) Chaitanya Mandlik said that a month-long investigation revealed that a Bangladeshi national, identified as Sheriar, is one of the leaders of the entire gang and is currently residing in the United Arab Emirates.
Mandlik said, “We have started the process of getting the lookout notice issued against Sheriar who is one of the many masterminds of this entire gang. This is the first time that an illegal telephone exchange operating on the basis of end-to-end communication system using SIP has been busted in the country.
“In a period of about one-and-a-half months, the illegal exchange converted about 43 lakh international calls into local GSM calls and caused a loss of Rs 4 crore to the government’s revenue,” the Deputy Commissioner of Police said.
According to the police, on the basis of intelligence inputs, the crime branch team along with the officials of the Department of Telecommunications raided the commercial premises of Navrangpura on December 4 and busted the illegal exchange. In this case, Sarkhej, a resident of Tabrez Kataria, was arrested from the spot.
Preliminary investigation revealed that the accused used SIP lines, routers with various cloud based software and hardware to convert incoming VoIP calls from other countries into GSM or local calls and would have caused huge revenue loss to the country. Was.
Days after the raid, the Ahmedabad Crime Branch arrested Dwayne Perera and Riyaz Shaikh along with him, who hailed from Pune in Maharashtra and were associated with a company that provided technical support for communications. According to the police release, the duo took the help of Kodinar resident Farzan Ali Qadri to get the SIP line and later opened an illegal telephone exchange from it to earn money. He took the line on lease in the name of Qadri’s associate Tabrez.
According to the release, the duo then involved Rafiq Babu, a resident of Kerala and Sheriyar, a Bangladeshi national, who used this exchange to convert incoming calls from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other Gulf countries into local calls, according to the release. Were. Both Babu and Sheriyar are currently in UAE.
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