Five including two brothers held over racket that converted ISD into local calls

Two brothers were among five more people arrested on Sunday over the telephone exchange racket busted in Bengaluru last week.

The racketeers had set up a system whereby international calls landed in their server, which converted them into local calls. They used thousands of SIM cards and hundreds of SIM boxes for the purpose.

The Anti-Terrorist Cell (ATC) of the Central Crime Branch (CCB) arrested the five people on the basis of information provided by two suspects arrested on June 7: Ibrahim Pullatti and Gowtham V.

The five have been identified as Mohammed Basheer, 51, Anas Athimannil, 30, both from Malappuram, Kerala, brothers Suresh Thangavelu, 32, Jai Ganesh, 30, and Santhan Kumar, 29, all from Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu.

The arrests were made after the ATC raided nine places in BTM Layout, Madiwala and Suddaguntepalya, all in South Bengaluru.

More than 3,000 SIM cards, 109 SIM boxes, 23 laptops, 14 UPS machines and 17 routers were also seized. In total, officials have raided 15 illegal telephone exchanges.

SIM card smuggling

Sources said Pullatti had been in touch with the brothers and Kumar. While the brothers were running a mobile phone sales and service store in Thoothukudi, Kumar was a sales executive at a telecom service provider. The brothers not only smuggled the SIM cards to Basheer and Anthimannil by courier, they also acted as a conduit for the SIM cards sent by Kumar to Pullattti, according to the ATC, headed by Assistant Commissioner of Police B R Venugopal.

Basheer and Anthimannil had set up nine telephone exchanges in Bengaluru, for which they were paid Rs 6,000 a month per exchange. The racket was masterminded by a man from Kerala, whom the CCB is actively pursuing. He gave Basheer and Anthimannil instructions on how to maintain the exchange. They alternated between the nine places every day, according to the ATC.

A court has remanded the five suspects in police custody until June 22.