The Special Task Force of Kolkata police arrested a 35-year-old man on Wednesday for allegedly installing a system that illegally terminated ISD and VoIP calls and made them look like local calls bypassing the legal international gateways.
Police said Amit Kumar Gupta had set up an illegal telecom installation using SIM boxes at his residence in Swinhoe Lane in Kasba. He had been allegedly operating for some time before the cops got a whiff of it and raided his south Kolkata house early on Wednesday. Three SIM boxes with 783 active SIM cards, one CPU, two mobile phones, three routers, a media converter and a pen drive were seized.
Gupta was produced at a court later in the day and remanded in police custody till October 2. “We will question him on his operation. Senior officials of the security wing of the department of telecommunication (DoT) will assist us,” said a police officer.
A SIM box works as a virtual telephone exchange that routes international phone calls as local calls.
A senior STF officer said the threat with the use of SIM boxes was that these illegal exchanges often served as ‘secret channels’ and could threaten national security.