Five such fraudulent cases have already been detected at Panchkula and they have already defrauded the DoT to the order of ten lakh rupees.

The racket began with the PCO owner buying a residential telephone from a subscriber and getting it calibrated unofficially from the market in order to use it as a commercial payphone. Sounds normal, but for the fact that after some time, the PCO owner did not pay the telephone bill, and the subscriber in whose name the telephone is originally allotted is asked to pay the amount. A vigilance team, headed by DEP (Vigilance), A S Hundal recently detected this racket. The telephones at the five locations where the fraud was perpetuated are likely to be disconnected shortly.

In one glaring case, the PCO owner first procured a payphone, and after using it for some time did not pay dues which reached Rs 50,000. Non-payment of dues led to disconnection of his payphone. Following this, he bought a residential telephone from another subscriber, acquired STD facility on this phone, and got it calibrated locally to commence his PCO services again. On this occasion, the arrears accumulated to one lakh of rupees which were again not paid, resulting in the disconnection of the telephone.

After this, another telephone was bought from another subscriber and this time the arrears went upto two lakhs. The fourth time, the PCO owner instead of buying a telephone, diverted an unauthorised wire from a telephone in the neighbourhood. In this case too, arrears shot upto a lakh of rupees.Sources say that with the telephones being calibrated in an unauthorised manner, the likelihood of the customer being duped on every telephone call that he makes is very high. For instance a call to Delhi during daytime has to be calibrated at five seconds.

However private calibration of the instrument to four seconds would imply that the customer is paying 20 per cent more than the official rates. DoT has now issued instructions stating that all payphones have to be calibrated at 16 khz, so that the exchange is able to monitor and control metering.