| A group of four ingenious youths used the system against itself to offer cheap telephony services for calls mainly originating from America thereby treating international calls as domestic ones. |
| The racket, deputy commissioner of police Yashaswi Yadav admitted, could have international ramifications as these youths must have had tie-ups with some US-based telephony service providers who must be offering cheaper call services to their customers. One such service provider, police said, was Sidpro Telemarketing and Systems of the US. |
| The culprits, identified as Tony Benjamin Samuel, Yash Sharad Kumar Verma, Prashant Kasimkar, and Rajiv Srinivas Uttarwar were operating from the low and middle-income residential area of Sheela Nagar in Gittikhadan where they had floated a company named Paramix. |
| They were receiving calls legally through voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and then routing them through regular voice network using a computer. |
| Experts said that the youths had, in effect, rigged a crude mini-exchange hiring a leased line for Internet and 24 fixed wireless terminals (FWTs) from Reliance Infocomm. |
| The calls would land here through the Internet on leased line on extremely cheap rates in a legal manner. The line was terminated in a computer that had a specially designed software which would transfer them to one of the 24 FWTs. From there on the calls would be treated as local domestic calls and be charged as such to the company. This was the illegal bit. |
| Yadav said, the kingpin behind the racket was yet to be nabbed as he was operating from Hyderabad. A police team has been dispatched to Andhra Pradesh for arresting the fifth accused. |
| Giving details of revenue sharing, Yadav said that Paramix had an arrangement with Sidpro in the United States whereby the latter charged the US-based user extremely competitive rates. The money was then shared between the service provider in America and Paramix. |
| The calls by-passed authorised service providers in the country and Paramix thus committed a crime robbing the BSNL and Reliance Infocomm of their revenue. Knowledgeable sources said that the BSNL gets a major chunk of the revenue for calls originating from abroad as Access Deficit Charge used for supporting rural telephony network in the country. |
| The balance amount is shared by the local service provider in the US and the Indian private operator "" if such an operator is involved in the call transaction. The total amount that the BSNL is estimated to have lost is Rs 2.64 crore while Reliance lost around Rs 1 crore, Yadav said. |
| While the going was good, Paramix and its US contact, must have earned handsomely for international calls are still not all that cheap. Paramix's account with the ICICI Bank here has been sealed. |
| A similar case was detected in Pune in September where Tata Indicom's lines were being used for the domestic transfer. The racket was busted by the Pune Police. |
| Yadav said that the crime came to light when it was found that there were no calls being received on the Reliance lines. The average billing of Reliance Infocomm was Rs 4 lakh a month. "There were only outgoing calls, no incoming calls," he said. |
| After Reliance Infocomm was approached and call data records (CDRs) procured from the private operator, the police randomly called up a few numbers which had frequently been receiving calls from Paramix. |
| "One Jaswinder Singh was called at Ludhiana who claimed he was indeed receiving calls from the US, but found it strange that they were routed through Nagpur. He didn't know anybody in the Orange city," Yadav disclosed. He said many such customers were called and the CDRs verified. |
| Reliance Infocomm's network then helped to trace the culprits. Their sophisticated global positioning system (GPS) technology and machines located at the hi-tech Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City (DAKC) were used in tracing the mini-exchange. Yadav said that the call transfer operation was being done automatically and nobody needed to be present to transfer the call. |
| "It was all hands-free. The place was locked and nobody needed to man the machine," he said adding that the computer with Paramix cost over Rs 2 lakh. |
| The police located the mini-exchange on Wednesday evening. The youths were nabbed in an operation that took more than 12 hours and the premises sealed. The computers and the 24 fixed wireless telephones along with a whole lot of literature and other records were seized. |
| The culprits have been booked under sections 420, 408, 120 (B) of IPC and sections 3 and 6 of the Indian Telegraph Act. The police are examining whether they could also be tried under Section 66 of the Information Technology Act which is more stringent. |
| Further investigations are on and more arrests cannot be ruled out. |
| Police fear national security breach |
| The police today said that they haven't ruled out the possibility of the international call racket busted at Nagpur being used to pass on information involving national security to the ISI. |
| "There could be some ISI agents based in the US who could be using the service to source nationally sensitive information," said DCP Yashaswi Yadav here while talking to the meida. |
| Yadav said the suspicion was being passed on to the Interpol and they would now examine if an international crime had also been committed. |
| He said that the police, on its part, will monitor all international leased lines in the region. Yadav also revealed that one of the accused, Rajiv Uttarwar had visited US in the past and was even now holding an open ticket for that country. |
| He said, Uttarwar's late father was a one time close associate of the architect of Indian super computer, Param, Vijay Bhatkar. |
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