Phone exchange scam: Loss to DoT may up to Rs 1000 crore

The Mumbai Crime Branch Unit 5, probing an illegal telephone exchange in Govandi-Trombay that was busted recently, suspect that a loss to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) due to the exchange can go up to Rs 1,000 crore.

According to the police, earlier, the DoT had estimated a loss of Rs 100 crore. However, during the investigation, it was revealed that the accused had received at least 4 crore calls from Gulf countries and the loss is ten times higher than what they had estimated.

"The loss can increase as the exchanges were running for the past 1.5 years and the earlier estimated loss was done on the basis of three months. So far, we have recovered 40,000 pages of call logs and also trying to locate people who all were getting calls. We are on the lookout of three more people. While two are from Mumbai the other is based in Dubai," said a crime branch officer.

The crime branch had busted a racket by arresting three persons from Govandi who were running a Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephone exchange service in which international calls were allegedly being made to India at local rates. The police have seized 50 SIM boxes, each costing Rs 45,000 that were illegally imported from China as amplifiers, along with over 200 SIM cards from various locations in the Govandi-Trombay belt.