In the 36 hours between 13-15 October, Nepal Telecom (NT) had lost Rs 16.3 million to a covert racket operated from Thailand. The racket used only four NT post-paid SIM-cards with an international roaming service worth Rs 30, 000.[break]
Investigation officials said that the case has turned out to be the fastest colossal call by-pass fraud ever meted out to Nepal Telecom.
"If one and a half day could bleed NT that much, the total loss figure will be much higher than expected or declared," said an investigatiion official of Nepal Police who has expertise in anti-VOIP operations. NT has not furnished new figures since last year when it said the company was losing Rs 600 million per annum due to illegal VOIP rackets.
Two major VOIP rackets raided by police in the year 2067 BS in Lalitpur accounted for a yearly loss of around Rs 1 billion, officials said. The largest racket, operated by Bangladeshi nationals at Khumaltar, had used around 4,000 SIM-cards into their secretive gateway machines.
NT has not shown any inclination to reveal the fluctuating figures accredited to illegal VOIP bleeding because of its failure to curb irregularities among its own staffers, said high-officials closely working with NT in this connection. NT spokesman Surendra Thike could not be approached for comments despite repeated attempts.
Metropolitan Police Crime Division (MPCD) and Central Bureau of Investigation have both been undertaking anti-VOIP operations and have conducted over a dozen successful raids in and out of the capital in one and a half year.
A crying shame at NT
Officials said the 36-hour roaming scandal that originated from Thailand, the first known case of its kind, has proven that the entire VOIP racketeering lives on lapses or deliberate malpractices at NT or other telecom service providers.
Two of its own engineers, Dipendra Rana Magar and Hansaraj Bijayananda, and five other staffers were identified by NT as the players behind the highest revenue leakage, and they were all handed over to police for investigation on September 23. They were later released on a condition to report when called.
The engineer duo had not cut off the roaming service despite termination of the fixed limit. "They just let it go on while there were continuous by-passing of international and conference calls," said investigative officials.
Similarly, NT staffers had abused their authorities in issuing post-paid SIM-cards (9851125181-84) without filling necessary details about the recipients and also overlooked the procedure of approving roaming service. "They did not follow proper documentation in connection with approving roaming facility," officials added.
Investigation also reveals that NT staffers could have connived with one Brightway Education Consultancy to fraudulently issue SIM-cards and to sanction roaming services. The documents recorded at NT to issue SIM-cards are found to be the testimonials of those unrelated persons who had approached the agency for abroad studies, police said.
The agency´s owner Uddhav Rai is at large. Police, however, has succeeded to arrest and prosecute one Rijan Humagain who collected all SIM-cards from NT.
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