Two arrested in Bengaluru for running illegal telephone exchange | Bengaluru News

Bengaluru: Central Crime Branch (CCB) arrested two men on charges of running an illegal telephone exchange, used to convert international calls into local ones, after raiding a house in Whitefield’s Immadihalli area. They recovered nine sim boxes, six routers, one laptop and 702 sim cards.The arrested men are Mohammed Safaf Khan, 31, from Mallappuram in Kerala, and Fayaz MA, 30, from Immadihalli. The third suspect lives in Dubai, police said.“Officials from a private cellular service filed a complaint that some miscreants were running illegal call centres and facilitating international calls to West Asian countries by converting them into local calls,” police commissioner Seemanth Kumar Singh said.The two accused claimed their Dubai associate had hatched the plan and sent the sim box via courier to Bengaluru. “According to the accused, they earned Rs 4-5 lakh per month, and the money was sent from Dubai through hawala. Their customers were mostly migrant labourers who were unable to make regular international calls to their families owing to high cost,” an investigating official said. How sim boxes work A sim box, also called sim bank, is used as part of a VoIP gateway installation and can have sim cards of different operators. This allows it to operate with several global system for mobile (GSM) gateways located in different places. Calls made through the internet are sent to sim boxes, which redirect this VoIP traffic on to mobile networks. Fraudsters effectively bypass the interconnect toll-charging points to exploit the difference between high interconnect rates and low retail price for on-network calls, thus causing huge losses to telecom firms.