Woman arrested for alleged SIM Box fraud
A 30-year-old woman has been arrested for alleged SIM Box fraud committed in her rented apartment at Aplaku, near Kasoa in the Central Region.
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By her operations, the suspect, identified as Comfort Gbedebo, a student and mother of one, is said to have denied the state revenue of $13,824 on a daily basis.
The suspect was nabbed red-handed, while operating from her single room in a partially completed building, near the All Faith Medical Centre at Aplaku on the Accra-Winneba road.
Second arrest
Her arrest is the second to be made this year in a special exercise conducted by the special task force made up of personnel from the Visa and Documentation Fraud Unit of the Ghana Police Service, in collaboration with Subah Info Solutions.
The task force on Friday, February 4, 2016, intercepted an illegal SIM Box operation at Gbawe in Accra where more than 8,600 SIM cards belonging to the MTN, tigo, Airtel and Glo mobile networks were retrieved.
SIM Box fraudsters reportedly use voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) technology to route calls to landlines and cellphones from any part of the world to Ghana and vice versa.
In the first operation, no persons were arrested as the task force found that the systems used by the illegal operators were remotely controlled.
Items retrieved from Aplaku
In the second operation, the task force retrieved two SIM boxes, loaded with 128 SIM cards each, comprising MTN and tigo SIM cards, an inverter and two batteries.
Additionally, 8,482 SIM cards comprising 5,861 used and one unused MTN card and 2,620 Tigo used SIM cards.
Suspect paid through money transfer
A source close to the task force told the Daily Graphic that preliminary investigations by the task force had established that Comfort, who lived in the single room with her three-year-old daughter and her younger sister, had been redeeming her share of the revenue from the illegal termination of international calls through money transfer.
The source said the last withdrawal of her share from her paymasters was done less than two weeks ago.
The team is said to have found evidence which proved that she was paid through the Western Union money transfer.