International call racket busted in Rachakonda

Rachakonda Cyber Crime sleuths have arrested cyber fraudsters Kema Murali Krishna, Shakamuri Prasanna Kumar, and Mandava Swaroopnath Chowdhary in connection with a call racket.

Rachakonda police on July 7 received a complaint from Mulplulri Laxmi Narasimham, SDE in BSNL, stating that authorities of the telecom company were alerted by some unknown customer on international calls received from a local CLI number.

During an investigation conducted by the technical team, it was found that the VOIP application of BSNL wings was also found loaded with this virtual server. It was found that the IP address of the PC/laptop was being used by one Shiva Reddy.

On enquiry with ISP Airtel, police traced the aforesaid IP address to Hyderabad and allotted to Airtel broadband account holder Shantha Kumari. It was suspected that Shiva Reddy, who was using the internet connection at Yapral, Hyderabad to access virtual server in Mumbai, was diverting international VOIP traffic to conventional mobile phone networks through BSNL wings VOIP numbers.

A case was registered on the above complaint under Sections 417, 419,420, 468, 471,120(b), and 212 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Sections 65, 66, 66 (C), 66 (D) of the IT Act and Section 20 of the Indian Telegraph Act.

As per the technical evidence collected, it was revealed that the prime accused was Kema Murali Krishna, a software network and security administrator.

In 2010, police said Krishna got acquainted with a person named Vardha and collected the material, that is, CDMA devices, to establish termination of call routing and diverted the international calls as local calls to earn money easily.

It is said that during the eight months the diversions were taking place, Krishna earned Rs 12-15 lakhs and purchased 22 gateways for the purpose of running call routing.

The accused have been apprehended and sent to judicial custody. A total of eight mobile phones, two Dell laptops, IBM carbon laptop, over 50 SIM cards of various mobile phone operators, dongles, data cards, debit and credit cards, a Maruti Brezza car, an Apple MacBook Air, two external hard disks, fake IDs and other documents were seized.