Pre-activated sim cards behind phone scamming: Gujarat Police

AHMEDABAD: Incentive schemes by service providers for mobile sim card dealers to meet their monthly sales targets are one of the biggest drivers of pre-activated sim cards being dumped among phone scammers, believe Gujarat police officials.
Most of these sim cards are being subscribed on forged documents and in third party’s names with fake documents.

But soon the DoT plans to curtail this menace by identifying these fake subscribers using its ‘Artificial Intelligence and Facial Recognition Powered Solution for Telecom Sim Subscriber Verification – ASTR,’ which will be launched in Gujarat and pan-India in coming weeks.
Last week, the Mewat region in Haryana, which is notorious for phone scamming criminals, baffled the Haryana police as it found a list of 4.96 lakh sim cards which were issued from other states, but were used exclusively in the region.
ASTR was run on the database to identify these numbers. Director DoT for Gujarat, Sumit Mishra told TOI, “The ASTR platform weeds out forged sim cards.
The software analyzes the entire subscriber base of all telecom service providers combine and identifies non-bona fide mobile numbers. “It will be a game changer for law enforcement agencies,” said Mishra. But cyber expert and consultant to Jaipur police Mukesh Chaudhry points to a loophole. “Issuing pre-activated sim cards is illegal. The police tend to spare such shop owners when the latter claim there are pressures from service providers to meet monthly targets.
Since the subscriber information comes with information like their latitude and longitude, the police should see how many of the fraudulent sim cards in their database were issued using the same handset, the same person from the same location.
“This way the police should book shop owners as well who issue such 100 or more sim cards,” said Chaudhry, pointing to an October 2020 DoT circular’s section 5 (b)(i)(ii) that says that state-level police can directly recommend blocking sim cards, “…if a mobile number is appearing in more than or equal to 3 complaints of frauds from 3 different locations.”
Mishra said that after ASTR’s pilot project in Mewat, Jamtara, J&K and a few north-eastern states, it is in advanced stage of a rollout for Gujarat state and pan-India. SP, cybercrime, Subodh Odedara adds, “We have identified dubious shop owners who issue pre-activated sim cards. But if a system like ASTR helps us weed out shop owners who have been issuing such dubious cards, we can begin registering cases against them.”