A 30-year-old woman from Nagaland was arrested for allegedly operating an illegal virtual telephone exchange using a SIM box to convert international internet calls of Chinese cyber gangs into domestic calls to target victims, police said on Monday.
The suspect, identified as Kung Panmae of Dimapur, was living with her husband in a rented accommodation in Sector-28. Police said seven phones, including three broken ones, a modem, three SIM cards and a broken laptop were recovered during a raid on February 10. She was formally arrested the next day and produced before a court for police remand for detailed interrogation.Earlier, older version of the illegal telephone exchange technology was used by gangs that facilitated those working in middle-east countries to make calls at cheap domestic rates to their families in India, police said.
Priyanshu Dewan, ACP (cybercrime), said the couple was running a virtual exchange in which three Android phones automatically dialled domestic numbers after disconnecting one call. “An app was being used by the Chinese cyber gang members operating from outside India to control the phones which were converting the voice over internet protocols (VOIP) into domestic network calls that were a threat to national security. This was virtually a telephone exchange being run by cyber criminals to fox the Indian law enforcement agencies,” he said.
Dewan said the exchange was busted during investigations into multiple cases with the help of the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) of the ministry of home affairs. He said the woman and her husband kept the phones charged so the system could run uninterruptedly for gangs making calls linked to digital arrest, investment and gaming frauds. “Cyber criminals sitting abroad were contacting their targets in India using the three active phones which were aimed to make it look like they were operating within the country,” he said.
Police said they are trying to locate similar exchanges and trace the husband and other suspects. An FIR under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and Information Technology Act was registered at Cyber crime police station (East) on February 11.