Bangladesh News

Rapid Action Battalion (Rab) members seized Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) equipment worth about Tk 15 lakh raiding one more illegal business office at Jigatala in Dhanmondi early yesterday.

Tipped off, Rab-2 raided the house of Rafiqul Islam alias Babul at around 1:30am. They held him and seized the VoIP equipment.

The seized equipment include 65 tellular devices, 62 mobile SIM cards, one computer monitor and its CPU and 65 adapters, Rab officials said.

Earlier on Thursday night, Rab intelligence unit busted the third floor of the four-storey Nur Villa at Badda in the capital and seized VoIP equipment worth over Tk 3 crore.

Mohammad Hasan and Azharul Islam Manik, who ran the unscrupulous telephone business, escaped arrest.

A member of the team that carried out the operation said the seized equipment include 18 pieces of quintum gateway equipment, 210 tellular devices, 10 UPS and two generators.

With yesterday’s recovery, the Rab so far busted 13 unauthorised VoIP business centres — 10 in the capital and three in Chittagong — since December 26 last year.

The total value of the seized items would be several hundred crore taka, Rab officials said.

Illegal VoIP operators use the equipment to generate or terminate overseas calls by first turning voice calls into data, routing it over the Internet and then turning the data into voice again.

The method, also known as Internet Telephony, bypasses BTTB (Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board), the sole carrier for overseas calls in Bangladesh and thus gets away without paying a huge revenue.