Bhubaneswar: Police Nagar Saheed here on Tuesday arrested seven people, including two private telecommunications company employees, on charges of illegally obtaining SIM cards that have been activated and supply them to cyber criminals in other countries.
Police confiscated more than 16,100 SIM cards that were not documulated from Vodafone, BSNL, Jio and Airtel and 110 cellphones from the defendant, 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 worked as direct sales executives and territorial sales executives, in private telecommunications service providers.
Subrates and Sukant are technical graduates.
The defendant produced false documents to obtain pre-active Sims with Convance from several private telecommunications employees.
“The motive is to do or help commit a crime by hiding their own identity and using a telephone number registered in the name of someone else to mislead the police.
This is an act of theft and imitation of identity,” said Director General of Police Abhay.
Police Commissioner Saumendra Priyadar Say the gang has supplied more than two pre-active lakh sims to cyber criminals in other countries, mostly in Haryana and Delhi.
The police were very losing about how the defendant managed to obtain a large number of SIM cards through the imitation and made it activated without valid document verification.
Police suspect the target set by a telecommunications company to sell SIM cards may have encouraged several employees to use this illegal practice.
“We are in the process of identifying Nexus and networks that have consequences between countries.
More arrests tend.
We try to find out how they come into contact with criminals between countries to supply SIMs activated previously.
People who are arrested are not directly involved in any cyber crime Even, but helps violations by supplying Sims, “Priyadarshi said.
The source said the defendant sold each SIM card that had been activated at the RS 500.
Initially, several defendants bought a large number of SIM cards that had been activated to take advantage of cashback offers on various e-commerce portals.
Then, they contacted several cyber criminals through YouTube and other websites and supplied them pre-active Sims, said other police officers.