The CBI acted on the complaint of India’s leading VoIP service provider World Phone Internet Services Pvt Ltd. According to the complaint, few former employees of World Phone joined CordiaLT, and shared the company’s data with its competitor, which led to the loss of several crores to World Phone.

The data, related to thousands of customers of World Phone, was stolen and used by CordiaLT, the complaint said.

After the World Phone COO Rajiv Kumar’s complaint last month, the CBI registered an FIR recently, and a team of the cyber crime cell raided the office of CordiaLT in Gurgaon, Sector 44, on January 21.

“It was alleged that CordiaLT, a ‘class A’ VOIP service provider, used the customer information of World Phone through corporate espionage and generate revenue through that information,” a CBI source said.

Kumar said: “We did our own research and found out that our database having information about thousands of customers was stolen. They were using this data collected over 7-8 years with lot of effort and resources.” Before approaching the CBI, the company collected evidence related to the exact data copied from their database.

“Some of our employees who were with us till last year joined them. Soon after that we got complaints from our marketing team that our data was being used simultaneously by them,” Kumar alleged. Kumar said his company spent Rs 9 crore only on advertisements to collect that data.

World Phone’s former employees named in the FIR are Sheikh Khalid Mohammad, Romit Singh and Muzaffar, who were questioned by the CBI. The agency also questioned the CEO of CordiaLT M D Vanjani.

When contacted, Vanjani said, “I don’t want to say anything. They are baseless allegations.”

According to CBI sources, the company has been using World Phone’s data since last few months. The CBI is now analysing the data and will send the database for forensic examination.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and the Department of Telecommunications are also separately investigating the case to find out if CordiaLT passed on the information elsewhere.

What is VoIP?
A technology that enables a person to make and receive phone calls through Internet. It also provides voice storage where one can access the VoIP voice mail online, store conversations on computer, and replay them.