Police bust international call hacking racket

FORBESGANJ: In a significant development, the police busted a big racket in international call hacking when they confiscated two illegal exchange towers and modems at the houses of brick kiln businessmen, Prayag Pratap Gupta, at Jogbani and Sitanshu Pratap Singh at Forbesganj in Araria district on Sunday.
A resident of Jogbani on Bihar-Nepal border, Subhash Choudhary, has been detained and interrogated in this connection, police said.
Forbesganj police, working in tandem with its Jogbani counterpart, confiscated the exchange towers, modems and other inputs used for the hacking business on Sunday. Araria SP Shivdeep Lande on Monday disclosed were hacking the international calls through these exchange towers for which they had entered into an agreement with a "fake" Noida-based company, Next Generation.
The Noida-based company extracted their own pound of flesh from these hackers, he disclosed.
Lande, spilling the beans on their operations, revealed that the call hacking put a clutch of Indian as well as Nepalese cellphone companies to huge losses.
The international calls were generally transformed into local calls triggering the losses to the cellphone companies, he said.
The racket has existed since long, the SP added. The 'innovative' but sinister technology developed by the hackers also hindered obtaining call details as well as surveillance putting, in turn, a question mark on the internal security aspect as well, Lande said.
The Nepal police, who have been intimated about the confiscation of the illegal exchange towers, are likely to join their Bihar police soon and also extend their co-operation in nailing this nefarious game, Lande added.
Once they reach, more skeletons will tumble out soon, he indicated.
The phenomenon of international call hacking was, in no way, limited to the border areas in Jogbani alone, it was rampant along long Bihar-Nepal border including Kishanganj district, SP Lande said.