Bhubaneswar police seize over 16,000 pre-activated SIM cards
The Bhubaneshwar police arrested a gang selling pre-activated cards to Cybercriminal outside the state. Police recovered over 16,000 Sims from the perpetrators. 7 people arrested in connection with the cybercrime syndicate Cuttack and two of them are the service provider.
Shaheed Nagar police in Bhubaneswar on Tuesday arrested seven persons, including two employees of a private telecom company, for illegally obtaining pre-activated SIM cards and supplying them to cybercriminals in other states.
The police seized over 16,100 undocumented SIM cards of Vodafone, BSNL, Jio and Airtel service providers and 110 mobile phones from the accused, who were identified as Maheswar Barik (38), Rajanikant Panigrahi (30), Subrat Kumar Panigrahi (24), engineering, Sukant Kumar das (30), engineering, Srinivas Ghadai (21), Rajesh Sethy (29) and Mangalamaya Mishra (27).
Maheshwar and Rajinikanth were working as direct sales executives and regional sales executives respectively with a private telecom service provider, Police said.
“The accused produced forged documents with the connivance and connivance of some pribat3 telecom employees to obtain an already active SIM. The motive is to commit or facilitate the commission of an offence by concealing one’s identity and using registered phone numbers in the names of other persons to mislead the police. This is an act of identity theft and impersonation,” said Director General of Police Abhay.
It’s confusing for Police how the accused managed to get a large number of SIM cards through impersonation and activate them by telecom companies without verifying any valid documents.
As per the reports the gang had supplied over two lakh pre-activated SIMs to cybercriminals in other states, mostly Haryana and Delhi.
