Hyderabad Police have claimed to bust Pakistan's ISI plot to extract sensitive information from security personnel in Jammu and Kashmir by using an illegal VoIP (voice over internet protocol) in Nalkunta.
A man from Hyderabad has been arrested who was allegedly helping the ISI to make calls to the J&K security officers and extract sensitive informationfrom them by posing as the military officers.
Hyderabad Police acted after a tip-off from the Military Intelligence unit in J&K earlier this month after they grew suspicious over the repeated telephone calls from senior Army officials who wished to seek the sensitive defence information.
A senior Telangana Police official reportedly said that a unit of MI had shared inputs earlier on the suspicious VoIP exchanges being operated from Hyderabad. "This led the police to discover that the illegal exchange was being exploited by ISI agencies in Pakistan to make calls to security officers in J&K and extract sensitive information," he added.
The VoIP enabled the rerouting of international calls into local Indian ones through a modem-like device called Sim Box. This enables an Indian number to flash on the receiver's phone which confuses even the agencies which track calls made to the security officials.
The police have recovered two sim-boxes, 53 illegal sim cards, laptops and computers from the possession of a local who was running the illegal internet telephone exchange in Nalakunta, Hyderabad.
The Police are likely to conduct more such raids in future as the illegal internet telephone exchanges being run in India pose a serious security threat to the country especially as it allows masks the suspicious international calls which are made.
The Police official told the Deccan Chronicle that the man who has been arrested will be questioned further and his terror links are not yet ascertained and that he was making money by earning six to ten paise per unit by rerouting international calls to local users.
In 2017, various illegal VoIP exchanges were unearthed in Maharashtra, Delhi, Hyderabad and other cities and the police have also recovered money, SIM cards and other electronic material from these places.
The intelligence agencies in India earlier said that there may be a full-fledged illegal racket being run in the country who are helping Pakistan gather sensitive defence information from India.
