[from]

I think you're conflating toll bypass fraud with IRSF. A grey route that never delivered any calls or only a fraction of them would have bad ACD numbers and people would not use that route. With hacked Asterisk/FreePBX boxes people usually call the international numbers described in OP and split the termination fee with some corrupt carrier/intermediary. There is a related fraud where people use the hacked Asterisk/FreePBX boxes to terminate calls, which from what I understand these actually have pretty good quality until the unwitting owner gets a $40,000 phone bill and shuts everything off. Traditional toll bypass fraud is when countries are expensive to call internationally but have cheap local calls, so people in those countries buy a bunch of sim cards, put them in a box with a bunch of gsm modems, and use those to basically "convert" an expensive international call to a cheap local call (and profit the difference between the two rates).

Edit: Oh, you're talking about number hijacking. I think they usually aren't offering termination services though, usually it goes hand in hand with the kind of fraud described in the OP.

[dmurray]

> Traditional toll bypass fraud is when countries are expensive to call internationally but have cheap local calls, so people in those countries buy a bunch of sim cards, put them in a box with a bunch of gsm modems, and use those to basically "convert" an expensive international call to a cheap local call (and profit the difference between the two rates).

Is this really fraud? Is it fraud to offer any VOIP service, or only when it can connect to the phone network, like Skype?

I guess I could see how it might be against the T&C's of the telecom company, to offer a service that undercuts them, but hardly a criminal act of deception.

[from]

I consider it to be relatively harmless but how it is classified depends on the country. India is pretty cheap to call even absent simboxes but they still crack down on the practice for “national security reasons” because it makes tracking people more difficult. The UK (Ofcom) banned them outright for some reason a long time ago but that’s being appealed. In some African countries the laws are pretty vague and do not outright ban them, usually they charge people with “unregistered telecommunications business” or something like that.

[lfodofod]

Fraud is what the government decides it is, the governments have deemed this to be fraud.

Telecom companies don’t necessarily care about this, it’s often the governments who want to tax incoming international calls as an easy revenue source.