A team of officials/officers from Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Tamil Nadu LSA,Law Enforcement Agency including Tamil Nadu Police and Chennai Telephones, BSNL, jointly raided the suspected house in Aminjikarai Chennai-29 and busted an illegal telecom set up, based on the inputs provided by the DoT, Tamil Nadu LSA and BSNL.

It has been found that an illegal telecom set up consisting of Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) box and a wireless internet router were used to terminate international calls as local calls bypassing the licensed International long-distance operator’s (ILDO) Network.

The SIM box fraud is a setup where fraudsters team up with partners abroad to route international calls through the internet using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). These international calls will appear as calls with local/national CLI. Such illegal telecom setups pose threat to national security in addition to causing revenue loss to the Telecom Service Providers (ILDO, NLDO, CMTS operators) & Government exchequer.

Illegal telephone setups in two locations at Chennai were busted on 23.11.2022. The equipment and setups were seized by the Police officials of Chennai Tamil Nadu. The setup consisted of the following:

• No of SIM Gateways (make-DINSTAR, capacity- 32 SIM ports) : 4.
• No of BSNL SIMs used : 130 (approx)
• SIM to WIFI Hotspot (make: DLINK, TLINK) : 2

Stray SIM cards, mobile and other similar equipment were also seized.

BSNL, Chennai Telephones has filed FIR against the accused for having performed such unlawful activities.

DoT has notified a toll free number “1800 110 420 / 1963” on which the public can inform DoT Call Center about receipt of an international call with local/national CLI(Caller Line Identification) or no number displayed on their phone.

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