India News | UP ATS Arrests Man for Running Illegal Telephone Exchange

Lucknow, Jul 23 (PTI) The Uttar Pradesh Police's ATS on Tuesday arrested a person for allegedly running an illegal telephone exchange, which used to bypass international gateway and 'converted' international calls as local calls.

Ashraf Ali was arrested from Dullipur in the Baksha area of Jaunpur for allegedly running the illegal exchange, an official statement of the ATS issued here said.

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Due to bypassing of the international gateway, callers could not be identified and there are possibilities of conversations related to radicalisation, Hawala, terror funding etc, and it also caused a loss of revenue, the ATS said.

A sim box, adapter, 4G router, 64 pre-activated sims, five mobile phones and a laptop have been recovered from the possession of the accused, it said.

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The accused used to land international calls bypassing the international gateway through the Internet via sim box, it said.

"Through this VoIP (voice over internet protocol) got converted to normal voice calls and the receiver used to see the number of the sim card used instead of the caller's number. Though the callers could not be identified," it added.

The calls were mostly from the middle-east countries, the ATS said.

During interrogation, Ashraf told ATS that the sim box was provided to him by Muhammad Ali of Saudi Arabia, who persuaded him to set up the illegal exchange, according to the ATS.

Ali configured the sim box remotely using a software, the ATS said, adding Ashraf allegedly used to get Rs 1 lakh per month for this.

The ATS has lodged an FIR against Ashraf at under the Indian Telegraph Act, Indian Wireless Act besides other relevant sections of the BNS.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)