New Delhi: Police on Friday arrested four for allegedly operating an illegal international tele-phone exchange in central Delhi's Hauz Qazi area. The cyber cell of the central district of Delhi Police arrested them on serious allegations of con-necting international calls via voice over internet protocol (VOIP).
The senior police officials also claimed that due to this, the government was bearing a loss of over Rs 1-1.5 crore daily, and the overall figure of loss till date is over Rs 103 crore. The kingpin of the racket Mohd. Irfan is a resi-dent of the Chandni Chowk area, who first worked as a technician of electronic gadgets and with the good knowledge in telecommunication he gradually installed a setup in Sita Ram Bazar, police said.
Cops further identified the other three arrestees as Irfan Ali, Zulfikar Ali and Areeb Ali, also resi-dents of the Old Delhi area.
DCP, Central Delhi Shweta Chauhan expressed a major concern as VOIP calls cannot be regulated or recorded and are almost impossible to track. Hence, making 4 crore calls so far is a major national security concern — over 2 lakh calls were made every day from Gulf countries and over 50,000 calls from Pakistan only were connected via this illegal telecom exchange.
The DCP added that lakhs from the USA, Australia, Kuwait, Qatar, Nepal also used to get connected via VOIP apart from Paki-stan and UAE.
The police have seized several routers, servers, SIP trunks, fake identi-ties (for buying mobile phones), and other illegal equipment from the spot. Police suspect that transactions were through the 'hawala' chan-nel. The operators charge commission for the service, and they promote "low cost" international calls to reach out to customers.