The West Bengal CID along with a vigilance team of the department of telecom on Tuesday unearthed an illegal telecom set up at Chandernagore in Hooghly district and arrested a Bangladeshi and three others for their alleged involvement in it, a senior officer said.
Acting on a tip-off, the state CID in a joint operation with officials of the Telecom Enforcement Resource and Monitoring (TERM) raided a flat at Chandernagore and found the illegal telecom set up for the alleged telephone exchange, DIG CID (operations) Nishant Pervez said.
He said in the joint raid at a rented flat belonging to a person named Pintu Das at Mitra Nivas in Chandannagar and found that an illegal telephone exchange was under installation there.
One Bangladeshi, identified as Mohammed Sarwer Jahan had arrived in India a couple of months back with an intention of establishing an illegal telephone exchange here, he said.
He had employed three locals to help him set up the telephone exchange. They were also arrested.
"The set up was apparently aimed to terminate VOIP international calls (bypassing the legal international gateways/router) resulting in loss of the revenue earned by the Government of India. It was also a threat to the security of the country," Pervez said.
"One CPU, sealed packets of postpaid and prepaid SIMs of various service providers, one server, one elastix PBX (private branch exchange), one TP link, one SIM box, one Ethernet media converter, one cable and broadband media converter have been seized during today's raid," he said.
Elastix is an unified communications server software that brings together IP PBX, email, IM, faxing and collaboration functionality. It has a web interface and includes capabilities such as a call center software with predictive dialing.
The three arrested were Pintu Das, the owner of the flat, Subhendu Ghosh, a resident of neighbouring Chinsurah and Asis Pal hailing from Dadpur in Hooghly district, he added.
All four were booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Indian Telegraphy Act and IT Act, Pervez said.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content
