After Bhubaneswar, Odisha Police Unearths Another SIM Box Racket in Cuttack

 Bhubaneswar: After Bhubaneswar, the Odisha police on Sunday unearthed another SIM box racket from Madhupatna area in Cuttack city.

The SIM box set up in Cuttack was detected after raids conducted following information extracted from Raju Mandal, the accused held in Bhubaneswar SIM box racket busting case.

Bhubaneswar deputy commissioner of police (DCP) Prateek Singh informed that the state police would seek the help of agencies like National Investigation Agency (NIA) and INTERPOL during the course of the investigation into the racket.

Singh further informed that some people from Bangladesh were engaged in setting up SIM boxes in Cuttack and Bhubaneswar and the entire syndicate will be busted.

“We have found a ‘Hawala’ link through which money was sent to Bhubaneswar from Bangladesh. Some people from Bangladesh were engaged in setting up SIM boxes in Cuttack and Bhubaneswar. The entire syndicate will be busted,” the DCP added.

On August 16, the police had seized seven SIM boxes from a house at Mahadevnagar under Laxmisagar police limits. Around one thousand SIM cards, mostly pre-activated from West Bengal, — old SIMs, routers and other equipment were also seized following a raid on the house.

The police informed that the arrested accused Raju Mandal’s handler was a Bangladeshi national identified as Asadur Jaman.

According to experts, a SIM box (also called a SIM bank), is a device used as part of a VoIP gateway installation. It contains a number of SIM cards, which are linked to the gateway but housed and stored separately from it.

The SIM box operator can route calls through the VoIP connection and connect the call as local traffic, allowing the box's operator to bypass high international rates and to reduce prices charged by local mobile network operators (MNO). In a single hour, more than one thousand calls can be made.