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SIM box fraud: Two from Kerala held in city

CHENNAI: Two men from Malappuram in Kerala who lived in posh apartment complexes on the city outskirts have been arrested for using sim cards fraudulently to route international calls as local ones and bypass international call rates and tariff charged by network operators. Police seized more than 1,135 sim cards of a private telecom company.


Those arrested people were identified as Fahad Mohammed, 25, and Sahal Sanavula, 25, natives of Malappuram in Kerala. Fahad lived at an apartment in Pallavaram, while Sahal was staying in Sithalapakkam.

Pallavaram police had received a complaint from nodal officer of Bharti Airtel, following which a police team conducted searches at the apartment in Pallavaram and found SIM boxes being used there. SIM box routes the connections back into the network as local calls, using hundreds of low-cost or even unpaid SIM cards, which are often obtained with forged identities.

Telecom operators face flak of interconnect bypass frauds as they often go undetected leading to financial losses.

Investigations revealed that they were part of a gang that had rented a flat in a premier apartment complex along GST road in Pallavaram, where they had installed SIM boxes. Through this setup, the accused used SIM boxes to route international calls and made it look like a local call, thereby bypassing international rates making the service provider incur losses. They would earn based on the differences between local and international tariffs

During the course of interrogations they told police they were paid 20,000 per month and were contacted only through phone and messages. They were remanded to custody.

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