For the third time in just over a week, Airtel Ghana, working closely with the Criminal Investigations Department of the Ghana Police Service, has busted a third SIM Box fraud syndicate. The latest syndicate, which was busted on the dawn of Thursday June 21, 2012, was operating from a hide-out at James Town in Accra. The team uncovered two hyper media SIM gateway equipment, each with the capacity to accommodate 160 SIM cards and a large quantity of SIM cards in the single room apartment. The team also confiscated two industrial batteries, several antennae, two modem hubs and other gadgets. Managing Director of Airtel Ghana, Philip Sowah was quoted in a statement as saying the collaboration with the security agencies has been tremendous. According to him, Airtel Ghana had made a lot of investment in state of the art equipment to help track and eliminate SIM boxing. “The loss of revenue through this kind of fraud is enormous, hence the importance we attach to it and our determination to do all we can to have it eliminated”, Philip Sowah said. He expressed delight that the collaboration between Airtel and the security services yielded results, saying that Airtel was happy to be recording successes as it strived towards eliminating SIM boxing. Philip Sowah noted that Airtel Ghana continued to receive immense support from the public through the 919 short code and the fraud@gh.airtel.com e-mail address set up by Airtel for subscribers to forward foreign calls that appear as local numbers. Airtel said in the statement that its successes in tracking down SIM Box fraudsters was saving the nation a lot of money, which would have otherwise gone into the pockets of the fraudsters. SIM box fraud is a set up in which some fraudsters in Ghana connive with partners abroad to route international calls through the internet using voice over internet protocol (VOIP) and terminate those calls through a local phone number in Ghana to make it appear as if the call is a local call. The caller is often not aware of the activities of these cyber fraudsters whose activities result in the loss of revenue to the state. This illegal activity is an issue of concern to Airtel Ghana, the Ministry of Communication (MOC) and the National Communications Authority (NCA) since the revenue loss affects the nation’s financial basket as well.