Gray Traffic Tunnel Discovered

A tunnel built to intercept 5,600 Hondutel telephone lines was discovered beneath the street between 4th Avenue and 2nd Street in the Concepcion neighborhood of San Pedro Sula. The tunnel of fraud was located below a shopping area where several small shops sell clothes and other products.

Hondutel technicians, the prosecutor on duty, and members of the National Directorate of Criminal Investigation (DNIC) were dispatched to the location where they found a decoder device that automatically makes the fraudulent calls without any person needed in attendance for it to work.

According to Omar Menjivar of the Legal Department of Hondutel, fraudsters would hijack 24 Hondutel telephone lines of subscribers for several days, then return the connection to the users who believed that it was a temporary problem with their line. Operators were believed to have had access to more than five thousand phone cards as well.

The rotation of the lines is making it difficult for technicians to detect where the fraud was originating. This operation robbed Hondutel daily of some eight thousand U.S. dollars (about 152,000 lempiras) reported Menjivar.


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