CCB busts second illegal call conversion racket in Bengaluru, probe indicates use in cybercrimes

Bengaluru: Central Crime Branch (CCB) of the Bengaluru police has busted yet another racket where international phone calls were being illegally routed as local calls and likely used in cybercrimes.

This is the second such illegal network busted by the officers, after a similar one last week, where two were arrested.

The CCB's cybercrime investigators began the probe on August 2 after a complaint by Anil Kumar on behalf of Vodafone Idea Limited in Domlur, Bengaluru.

Kumar had informed the police that the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had communicated to them about an illegal SIM box operation allegedly used to facilitate cybercrimes. A SIM box is a device containing multiple SIM cards that can be used to route international calls back into the network as local calls.

The DoT had said that the activity was traced to International Tech Park in Bengaluru’s Whitefield area, the FIR noted. The DoT claimed that 107 mobile numbers issued by Vodafone Idea Limited were suspected of being used in SIM boxes. “Upon internal verification, we found that all 107 SIM cards were issued to a company named Gleam Global Services India Private Limited,” the FIR noted.

During the investigation, the CCB found that the SIM cards were purchased under the name of Gleam Global Services India Private Limited and were used in SIM boxes installed illegally at Iron Mountain Data Centre, Whitefield. “The activity involved illegally converting international calls into local calls, compromising national security and causing financial losses to the government and the telecom operator,” a CCB official said.

The officials immediately gained custody of Chota Ahammed Mubaraq alias Tufail, 37, originally from Tamil Nadu. Tufail, a BE graduate residing in Kothanur in Bengaluru, was lodged at the Parappana Agrahara Central Prison in Bengaluru after the CCB recently arrested him for cheating victims of cybercrimes by offering them false legal aid online.

“During the probe, the suspect confessed to his involvement in installing the SIM box infrastructure, a the data centre. He also stated that two others involved in this were abroad and were in contact with him, and he acted on their direction. A Look Out Circular (LOC) will be issued against them,” an officer said.

The CCB police searched the data centre and recovered six SIM boxes, 133 SIM cards, 12 data storage servers, one networking router/switch and other related equipment, all valued at around Rs 10 lakh. The probe so far indicated that the seized SIM cards may have been used in cybercrimes, and a further probe was on to ascertain it.

Bengaluru police commissioner Seemant Kumar Singh urged the owners of the data centres to verify the background before renting. "In this case, the owners had no clue about the misuse," he said.