Hyderabad is fast becoming infamous as the hub for illegal international incoming calls.

According to damning statistics released by the Department of Telecom, of the 580 complaints of grey or illegal international calls received across 12 states, Hyderabad accounted for a whopping 252 cases or 43 per cent of all the illegal international calls in the past month.

The vigilance wing of the DoT has also severely criticised the mobile service operators in the city who, according to the department, were doling out cellular connections without verifying the bonafide of the subscriber.

As per information garnered by the vigilance telecom monitoring cell, it had busted 16 cases in one month, involving 576 telephone connections. The potential loss is estimated at close to Rs 6.02 crore (Rs 60.2 million) a month.

Disclosing this at a press conference after a joint meeting with the local service providers, G S Grover, senior deputy director general (Vigilance), Department of Telecom, said the loss to the international long distance and national long distance service providers, including BSNL on account of international grey calls, is estimated at Rs 350 crore (Rs 3.50 billion) over the past year.

According to Grover, the grey market operators channel traffic from foreign telecom carriers by setting up illegal exchanges using sophisticated equipment.

They obtain telephone lines or mobile phone connections from any of the telecom service providers on some fictitious name and interface them to international media like VSAT or ISDN lines or through Internet service providers.

Wrong numbers Hyderabad accounted for 43% of the total illegal international call traffic in the past month Reliance phones contributed close to 54% of the grey market violations in this period Airtel and state-owned BSNL contributed 18% and 8%, respectively

"In normal practice, any international call should travel over the network of authorised international long distance or national long distance operators. Foreign calls should be delivered to the access service providers (ASP) like BSNL, Reliance or other private operators. In this case, the five ILD operators get the revenue from the foreign carrier and share it with the NLD and ASPs as the case may be," Grover pointed out.

The grey market is growing very fast since customers who make calls from these foreign carriers and get their calls routed through these illegal channels are charged much lower rates compared to normal calls.

Interestingly, Reliance phones contributed close to 54 per cent of the grey market violations in this period, Grover said with Airtel and state owned BSNL contributing 18 per cent and 8 per cent respectively.

Grover said all the ASPs of Andhra Pradesh had agreed to comply with the guidelines and cooperate with the vigilance wing to check this menace.

"All the operators are advised to verify the credentials of their subscribers and come out with clean data. If any connection issued by these operators are found to be used for illegal channelling of international calls across the country, they will be penalised," Grover said.

Licences of four Internet service providers, namely Hyderabad's Sigma Online, Delhi's Megnacom and Sivam Data Tech and Jaipur's Capital Online have been cancelled as they were found to be involved in this illegal call trafficking, Grover said.

Besides, the leased lines of over 50 firms were also misused for the purpose, he said.

What has compounded the problem is that countries from where the calls originate do not treat this practice as illegal.