Chennai: The Tamil Nadu Cyber Crime Wing has busted an alleged illegal SIM box network operating from Saidapet in Chennai and arrested two employees, linking the setup to 301 cybercrime complaints registered across India, police said.

Acting on intelligence shared by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), a joint team raided the offices of Forte Management Services in Saidapet. Police seized 11 SIM boxes — three devices with 64 SIM slots each, seven with 32 slots each and one damaged unit — along with 182 SIM cards, two servers and two CPUs, according to the Cyber Crime Wing.

Superintendent of Police (Cyber Crime Wing) S. Selvanagarathinam said the company operated a loan recovery and collection service for banks and non-banking financial companies as its front-end business, while allegedly running cybercrime activity through its backend, investigators alleged. The arrested employees were identified as Srinivasan, a manager, and Sanjay, an information technology technician.

Source: The Mainstream

Initial verification linked the seized hardware and SIM cards to 301 complaints lodged on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP) from various states, including 52 complaints from Tamil Nadu, police said. A second report of the same raid also recorded 301 linked complaints, 52 of them from Tamil Nadu, and the seizure of 182 SIM cards, two servers and two CPUs.

Source: The420

Owner not yet arrested, probe continues

Police said the owner of the company is yet to be arrested and that other employees and the seized equipment are being examined. The allegations against those arrested are yet to be tested in court, and the investigation is continuing to establish the full network behind the operation, police said.