NEW DELHI: Delhi Police on Monday claimed to have cracked a gang allegedly involved in cloning of mobile phones with the arrest of five persons and recovery of 33 cloned sets.
The arrests and seizure came following investigations by city polices Crime Branch into a complaint filed by Tata Telecom that a large number of phones provided to customs were cloned.
Mohammad Arif (29), Ashwani Tiwari (30), Amir Ali (24), Shashad (26) and Amjad Khan (25) were arrested and 33 cloned phones and the computer and software used for cloning the mobile sets were recovered from them, police said.
During interrogation, police claimed, Arif and Ali said they used to charge anything between Rs 800 and Rs 1,000 for providing a bill-free cloned phone.
The gang allegedly used two types of cloning, they said. The first one was cloning of Tata Walky CDMA, in which the bill went to the legitimate owner while the cloned phones were used to make illegitimate STD calls.
The second type was the cloning of Tata CDMA into Tata Walky CDMA and then using them for calls at STD booths.
In the first case of cloning, the handler of the cloned Walky set took call charges at par or some times at a subsidised rate to gather customers but did not pay the service provider any money as it was billed in the legitimate owners bill.
In the second case, it was found that the Tata CDMA sets handsets came cheaper compared to the Walky.
The handlers of these type of cloned phones used to collect money at normal rate even though the charges were much cheaper.
Tiwari worked for Tata Telecom and had an identity card issued by the company and customers used to believe him, police said.
The role, accountability and criminal liability of PCO owners who had used the cloned sets is still being ascertained as they had been paying their bills regularly, they said
