Fake telephone exchanges routed Pak calls to J&K

Mumbai: Two days after the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) busted fake telephone exchanges operating from Latur, investigations revealed that their illegal set up routed several calls from Pakistan to Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), the traces of which were found by the military intelligence wing. The nature of these calls is not clear yet, but officials said that the international Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) calls were illegally routed to J&K through local mobile numbers.

The modus of routing these calls from Latur was to avoid coming on the radar of the agencies, officials said.  

The arrested accused from Latur were identified as Shankar Birajdar (33) and Ravi Sabde (27) who were operating the illegal telephone exchanges.

When Maharastra DGP Satish Mathur was asked about the nature of operations of these telephone exchanges, he said, “We would not be able to disclose much in the case at the moment as the investigation is underway.”

Birajdar and Sabde’s questioning led to interstate raids by the ATS on Sunday who arrested two more persons, Ibrahim Rashid (36) and Abdul Faiz (37) in Telangana.

Preliminary investigation revealed that the accused arrested from Latur had given them operational knowledge and SIM cards to run the business there in lieu of 50 per cent profits from the business.

Sabde, who is a SIM card distributor at Latur, had provided SIM cards for running a similar illegal telecommunication exchange at Hyderabad.

“Both of them are found to be the owners of this illegal business in which Rashid was providing operational infrastructure, whereas Faiz provided the room for running this illegal telephone exchange,” said an ATS officer.

The officials have seized a laptop, two VOIP GSM gateway SIM boxes, Internet broadband modem, mobile repeater and booster power cable.

Illegal centres

The illegal telephone exchanges used gadgets to route international Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) calls to local mobile numbers as voice calls illegally. These calls would be transferred to the beneficiary (call receiver) via illegal international gateway machines. It is learnt that this type of illegal VoIP exchanges were used by the intelligence agency of the neighbouring country to spy on sensitive military information.