Trader digi arrest: Police unearth Bangladesh, Malaysia, Tripura links

Kolkata: The probe into the digital arrest fraud — where a trader from Marquis Street was arrested for duping a senior citizen, a businessman, of Rs 3 crore in a digital arrest fraud in Oct last year — led cops to an international network with operatives from Bangladesh and Malaysia, led and masterminded by a resident of Tripura.Investigators said the racket, which allegedly extorted crores from multiple victims across the country by impersonating CBI officers and threatening "digital arrest" over a fabricated parcel case, was powered by an illegal telecom gateway run from a rented house in central Kolkata and linked to operators across multiple countries.
While initial questioning suggested the SIM box station owner, who arranged the illegal telecom gateway, Abir Sk (initially arrested by Bidhannagar City Police) had links to Bangladesh and used a Bangladeshi VPN and virtual numbers to conceal command-and-control access, investigators now alleged the wider conspiracy was directed by Biplab Hossain of Tripura. A Malaysian national, Chung Wei Kiat, who visited India on a medical visa, is also under the scanner for suspected facilitation and coordination.The breakthrough came after the victim reported getting intimidation calls from two Indian mobile numbers. Call detail analysis and technical tracing by police and telecom officials indicated the calls were not originating from ordinary handsets but were being terminated locally after travelling over the internet as international VoIP traffic. The pattern—high-frequency outgoing calls, repeated short durations, and routing anomalies—matched the signature of a SIM box, a device that can host dozens to thousands of SIM cards and convert internet-based calls into local GSM calls, masking the true origin and bypassing international termination charges.Surveillance teams were deployed after telecom department inputs flagged suspicious SIM activity clusters in Baguiati, Rajabazar and Esplanade. Officers tracked the movement of a key operator, identified as Abir Sheikh, to Hatiara in Baguiati, where he was intercepted on Feb 14 with a SIM box unit. On Feb 15, a raid at a house on Patwari Bagan Lane under Amherst Street revealed a fully functional illegal telecom gateway. Police also recovered foreign currency, including Malaysian notes, which they said strengthened the cross-border link.