Bhubaneswar: Seven held for supplying SIM cards to cyber crooks

BHUBANESWAR: The Saheed Nagar police here on Tuesday arrested seven persons, including two employees of a private telecom company, on charges of illegally acquiring pre-activated SIM cards and supplying them to cyber criminals in other states.
The police seized over 16,100 undocumented SIM cards of Vodafone, BSNL, Jio and Airtel and 110 mobile phones from the accused, identified as Maheswar Barik (38), Rajanikant Panigrahi (30), Subrat Kumar Panigrahi (24), Sukant Kumar Das (30), Srinibas Ghadai (21), Rajesh Sethy (29) and Mangalamaya Mishra (27).
Police said Maheswar and Rajanikant were working as direct sales executive and territorial sales executive, respectively, at a private telecom service provider. Subrat and Sukant are engineering graduates.
The accused produced fake documents to acquire the pre-activated SIMs with the connivance of some private telecom employees. “The motive was to commit or help commit crimes by concealing their own identities and using the phone numbers registered in the names of others to mislead the police. This is an act of identity theft and impersonation,” director general of police Abhay said.
Police commissioner Saumendra Priyadarshi said the gang had supplied over two lakh pre-activated SIMs to cyber criminals in other states, mostly in Haryana and Delhi. The police are at a loss as to how the accused managed to acquire such huge quantities of SIM cards through impersonation and get them activated without verification of valid documents. Police suspect the target set by telecom companies to sell SIM cards may have prompted some employees to resort to this illegal practice.
“We are in the process of identifying the nexus as well as the network which has inter-state ramifications. More arrests are likely. We are trying to find out how they came in contact with the inter-state criminals to supply pre-activated SIMs. The arrested persons were not directly involved in any cyber crime, but aided the offence by supplying the SIMs,” Priyadarshi said.
Sources said the accused sold each pre-activated SIM card at Rs 500. Initially, some of the accused procured a large number of pre-activated SIM cards to avail cashback offers on various e-commerce portals. Later, they contacted some cyber criminals through YouTube and other websites and supplied them the pre-activated SIMs, another police officer said.