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17 PTCL officials held for fraud

MULTAN: The army monitoring team on Wednesday arrested an assistant engineer and 16 operators from trunk call section of Central Telephone Exchange red-handed minting money by misusing five telephone lines by deceiving the computerised network with the help of an Integrated Circuit (IC).

This digital fraud was unearthed after the gang was put under surveillance for two months.

The gang of engineers and operators, 17 in all, were handed over to an FIA team, headed by City Magistrate Tanvir Iqbal. More arrests may also take place in this regard, the army monitoring cell sources said.

According to sources, some officers and operators were using the telephone lines in collusion with the public call offices in Karachi for illegal financial gains in an organised manner without leaving any trace on official record.

The accused used to misuse a special IC chip made in Japan, which was affixed in the computer keyboard. A programme was installed on this chip by the accused with the help of a local expert.

The special IC chip was capable of connecting calls for six subscribers at a time. Abusing this feature of the chip, the operators used to connect one legitimate call, which in turn opened five more telephonic lines for illegal use.

The chip enabled the accused to dial 0 or 1 to accomplish their objective.

The army team took possession of all relevant record including the five chips and sealed it.

The accused are Assistant Engineer Muhammad Hanif and Operators Nazar Abbas, Ayyaz, Muhammad Siddique, Muhammad Yaqub, Muhammad Hashmat, Mazhar Bhutta, Abdul Ghaffar, Ijaz, Rafiq, Afzal, Niaz Hussain, Athar, Israr, Arshad, Ahmed and Ajmal.

These accused had been abusing the PTCL lines for the last two-and-a-half years minting money and causing leakage of revenue amounting to millions.

The accused used to pool all the ill-gotten money and distribute it monthly among all of them according to their designations.

Relevant record from the GPO Multan, number of PCOs in Karachi have also been taken into custody by the army team.

Meanwhile, sources informed that the exchange continued to work normally during the seven-hour raid.ÑAPP