Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) or the special Pakistan police team along with Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) succeeded in confiscating an illegal gateway exchange at Hangu on Wednesday. This illegal exchange comprised of six Gateways, multiple ports, hundred of SIMs, three Laptop, five Modems, one CPU and UPS with batteries. FIA has arrested two grey operators and investigations are going on.
FIA wanted to curb the activities of grey traffickers and hence asked PTA to monitor the international calls which show up as local numbers on their devices. Generally in the grey trafficking operators use illegal routes to make the international calls by skirting the legal routes, ultimately leading to high financial loses to the Government. Normally an international call should show a legal number and the corresponding country code. However, maximum chunk of international calls coming in and going out of Pakistan are for Saudi Arabia and there are lots of issues going on with respect to the tariff. Hence these grey traffickers use a bypass due to which the international calls would appear to be a local call and the tariffs would change. FIA has given the credit of the raid at Hangu to PTA’s continuous efforts in monitoring the calls and their commitment to curb the activities of grey trafickkers.
PTA has also announced a 24 x 7 SMS service for lodging such complaints and it will be free of cost.
