New Delhi, Jan 14 (PTI) The CBI has taken over the investigation into an alleged illegal phone exchange operating from Narayanpur village in Bihar which was converting VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol)
calls into voice calls using a sophisticated setup to commit cybercrimes, officials said Wednesday.
The probe agency registered an FIR against mastermind Mukesh Kumar, who was operating the exchange in Narayanpur village in Bhojpur, besides Rejaul Haque and Muktadir Hossain, the Point of Sale operators based in Malda who had allegedly sold 67 suspicious SIMs used by Kumar.
After the illegal operation was unearthed by the Bihar Police in July last year, the state government handed over the case to the CBI.
The central government issued a notification recently for handing over the case to the CBI, following which the agency re-registered the Bihar Police FIR as its own case.
The Digital Intelligence Unit of Bihar Police had detected the use of a sophisticated setup of a SIM box -- which used multiple SIMs to route international calls and messages through local numbers, often illegally to bypass high international charges or for scams, making calls seem local -- in Narayanpur.
It was also detected that over 20,000 calls were made from Narayanpur to different numbers using the setup.
During the raid, the Bihar Police found the SIM box operational in Kumar's attic. In its FIR, the state police had alleged that Telangana Police had also pinpointed Narayanpur. It alleged that the VOIP system is being used by terror groups abroad to contact their sleeper cells, anti-national elements and their cadres, evading detection by agencies.
The state police had alleged that the exchange was being used to commit large-scale cybercrime operations across the country.
The police had alleged that, according to their information, illegal SIMs activated in Malda, West Bengal, were being used in the SIM box recovered by them. All these SIMs were tracked to Rejaul Haque and Muktadir Hossain of Malda. PTI ABS RT
