KATHMANDU: The Central Investigation Bureau of Kathmandu on Monday said two people were arrested for operating illegal call bypass centres in Kathmandu and Pokhara recently.

The arrestees have been identified as Rakesh Giri (65) of Sanepa in Lalitpur and Ganesh Kumar Malla (34) of Jang in Rukum.

Based on a tip-off, the CIB team had arrested the duo under 'the Operation Voice Fox' on December 24, 2016.

According to police, Giri ran a call bypass centre in Pokhara of Kaski with the help of Shiva Chandra Rokka (28) of Jang in Rukum.

Police also collectively seized three 32-port GOIP gateway devices, two laptops, hard drives, two flash drives, two routers, a Digicom Media Converter, 30 sets of GSM antennas, 32 NTC SIM cards, 80 NCell SIM cards from their Kathmandu and Pokhara bases.

Giri has been handed over to the Kaski District Police Office for further investigation.

Police records also showed that the Giri had been a repeated offender.

Earlier in July 2006, Giri had done a 24-day jail term and paid a penalty of Rs 500,000 after he was found guilty of illegal call bypassing.

On June 2011, he was arrested from Jaisidewal along with his son, Girish Giri (35) for the same. The father-son duo had served the jail terms of one-year and two-year respectively.

Again in September 2014, the duo were arrested from Lalitpur and served one-and-half-year and two-year jail term respectively.

Anyone found guilty of illegal call bypassing are fined or jailed upto five years under the Telecommunications Act, 1997.

Meanwhile, the CIB has urged the member of the public to be aware of the possible crimes around them and inform police of any suspicious activity.