The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has deployed a new system to help identify and even block illegal international calling gateways, and the system has already been used successfully.
The PTA and federal investigators raided the office of an ILD operator on Monday, according to an Express Tribunereport on the new system.
Investigators were reportedly able to determine that the ILD operator, Wisecom, was terminating 360,000 illegal minutes of international voice traffic per day masked as local traffic, thus avoiding government taxes of over $11 million a year.
The invesigation was started after the new “grey traffic” monitoring system identified anomalies in Wisecom's traffic patterns.
While Wisecom has a license to provide ILD services, the PTA touts the new system as being also capable of identifying the presence of long-distance gateways operating without a license, and to remotely block their operation. It has already identified several illegal gateways.
The new system was installed in October, but the PTA has been grappling with the issue of tax-evading illegal international gateways for some time.