India News | Rajasthan Police Bust Gang Supplying SIM Cards to Cybercriminals; Two Held

Jodhpur, Mar 17 (PTI) Rajasthan Police has claimed to have busted a gang involved in procuring mobile SIM cards in the names of illiterate labourers and supplying them to cybercriminals, arresting two persons, officials said on Monday.

One of the accused, Rahul Kumar Jha (30), runs a mobile shop retailing Airtel and Vi SIM cards in the Sangariya area, while the other, Mohammad Iqbal (25), was also part of the racket, they said.

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Police have seized 104 SIM cards, 31 mobile phones, two fingerprint scanners, a chequebook, five ATM cards, nine signed blank cheques, Aadhaar and PAN cards, and an account ledger from the accused, they added.

Out of around 300 fraudulently issued SIM cards, 33 have been linked to 38 cyber fraud complaints across the country, amounting to more than Rs 50 lakh, officials said.

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Deputy Commissioner of Police (West) Rajarshi Raj Verma said that under an ongoing operation to dismantle cybercriminal networks, police received information that Rahul had illegally issued around 40 Airtel SIM cards.

“The accused, who runs a mobile shop and works as a SIM retailer, was illegally obtaining SIM cards and supplying them to cybercriminal networks. Based on concrete inputs, a special team was formed to probe the matter,” Verma said.

"When the police team investigated the details of some fraudulently issued mobile SIM numbers, they found that four to five SIM cards were issued under a single person's name", he said.

The team then tracked down those persons and questioned them, who denied of any knowledge of multiple SIM cards issued in their names but confirmed that they had purchased one SIM card from Rahul.

During interrogation, the accused revealed they had fraudulently activated over 300 SIM cards in the names of labourers and supplied them to a cyber fraud network.

Investigating just 33 of these SIMs has already uncovered 38 cyber fraud cases worth more than Rs 50 lakh nationwide. Given the pattern, the total fraud amount from all 300 SIMs could run into crores, officials added.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)