Man held for keeping SIM boxes illegally

kolkata: The Special Task Force (STF) of the Kolkata Police nabbed a man from a house in Kasba and seized three Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) boxes along with mobile phones and other gadgets on Tuesday.

The accused person, identified as Amit Kumar Gupta, was arrested on the basis of a complaint lodged by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). He was produced at the Alipore court and has been remanded to police custody till October 2.

According to STF officials, on Tuesday officials of DoT approached the STF and informed them that they spotted an illegal landing of international calls bypassing the government recognised gateways.

Acting on the information, a STF team conducted a raid at 16 Swinhoe Lane and found that Gupta was using three active SIM boxes having 512 slots with 73 active mobile phone SIM cards. He was using the technology to terminate the International Subscriber Dialing (ISD) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) bypassing international gateways of domestic service providers in India, in order to evade tax.

After the raid, a complaint was lodged on behalf of the DoT at the Kasba police station and a case was registered.

Earlier this month STF of the state police arrested three people and seized 18 SIM boxes. During the probe, cops found that the accused persons were bypassing the legal gateways for ISD calls. However no terror link was found till date.

It may be mentioned that a SIM box is a device which can convert an international call to a local call while calling in India from other countries.

In this way not only government is loosing revenue, but also such calls cannot be traced. If any terrorist organisation uses the technique, then it will be a major threat.