|
International call scam bleeds BSNL (Times of India, February 18, 2004) By Rahul ChandawarkarClick here for actual article. Pune: Cellular phone connections obtained under forged identities. Calls to Gulf countries that leave no trace on billing records. A multi-crore telecom fraud that’s bleeding state-owned incumbent Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) of crores every month. Enter the shadowy, tech-driven world of “telecom fraud”, a new line in crime that the Pune police are trying to crack down on. Two months ago, the BSNL asked the police to probe subscribers of its CellOne services who had outstanding bills ranging between Rs. 4 lakh and over Rs. 15 lakh each, but who seemed to have vanished. The bulk of this illegal traffic comes from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Goa – and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman. As the scale and possible consequences of this operation slowly dawned on R K Agarwal, Pune general manager for BSNL’s mobile operations, he went to the cops. Though he told TNN that he couldn’t assess the magnitude of the fraud, estimates suggest that it could run into a few hundred crores. The Pune police confirmed that the probe was on, and that the scam was a major source of the black money that was pouring into the city. Migrant workers in the Gulf and their relatives at home are the major gainers from the scam. Police suspect that the operators of the racket could be spread over several states, even across countries. Here’s how the scam works: scamsters get CellOne connections with long distance and conference options under aliases. These are used to make calls overseas. Using the conference facility on the CellOne phone, the scamster calls his Indian client and patches him through to his friend overseas. So, the caller and receiver both get incoming calls, which are free; the entire charge for the ISD call goes to the CellOne phone, so which nobody’s going to pay anyway. In one case, a call was first made to Saudi Arabia (country code 00966) and within seconds, another call was made to Hyderabad (040). This conversation lasted for 40 minutes. When the call was conferenced with the BSNL mobile as the inferface, the Saudi call go patched through to Hyderabad and got converted from an ISD to an STD call. The BSNL concedes that its lack of an effective bill monitoring and default check system has led to a scam of this magnitude. It’s planning to put in early warning systems that will flag default alerts faster. The relative ease of obtaining cell connections without, for instance, address verification, could have led to proliferation of the fraud. International area codes dialled frequently under this racket were those of Kuwait (00965), Saudi Arabia (00966) and Oman (00968). Similar domestic STD codes of Hyderabad and Secunderabad (040 series), many towns in Kerala (0484, 0474 series), Bangalore (080) and Solapur appear prominently in these bills. An idea of the scale can be got from the fact that in the small western Maharashtra town of Solapur alone, the BSNL has identified at least five fictious subscribers, whose individual unpaid bills amounted from Rs. 8 lakh to Rs. 12 lakh. Box I - Unsuspecting Puneite lands Rs. 5.41-lakh bill! Pune: Many an innocent Puneite has been drawn into the web of the persons responsible for the multi-crore CellOne fraud. The scamsters have used the names and addresses of several citizens with impunity to file bogus applications with the BSNL. Of course, the scamsters’ designs have only been aided by the lack of an alert/flagging system with the BSNL and gross negligence in the verification of documents and antecedents. Prashant Gopalan, a city-based insurance executive, is one such victim. The scamsters took a CellOne connection in his name and ran up outstanding bills totalling Rs. 5.41 lakh. A shocked Gopalan told TNN on Tuesday that the scamsters had given the address of his vacant Vishrantwadi apartment in their application. “Neither had I applied for a cell-phone connection nor had I given my flat out on rent for the past three years,” he said. Gopalan began receiving bills from May 2003. One bill was for a whopping Rs. 2 lakh, he said. Gopalan said he had sent a complaint letter as well as the first two bills by registered post to BSNL. “I later met Mr. Punde, the assistant general manager (billing), in person. Punde showed me the fake application form, fake ration card and incorrect photograph last year,” he added. Gopalan has been communicating with the BSNL for the past few months. “When I spoke to them recently, they said the had referred my case to the local police,” he said. The details of calls listed in Gopalan’s bill reveal the pattern of fraud. A similar pattern presents itself in the unpaid bills that other unsuspecting citizens have received. These bills are for amounts of Rs. 4 lakh, Rs. 5 lakh, Rs. 9 lakh and even Rs. 15 lakh and Rs. 20 lakh! Gopalan’s case, along, with that of two others, Sunil Bhalerao and Hashmukh Shah, was brought to the notice of the Pune police about two months back in a written complaint by Bhalchandra Autade, BSNL’s telecom revenue inspector. According to BSNL officials, about 150 connections, were being booked per months under fictitious names and addresses or forged documents in Pune alone. The revenue loss is a staggering Rs. 2 crore per month. Pointers
|