Racket of illegal purchase-sale of SIM cards busted; 7 held

Crime Branch Bhiwandi unit today claimed to have busted a racket of illegal purchase and sale of SIM cards and arrested seven people in this connection.
The seven persons have been held for running the racket wherein they procured SIM cards of different mobile service operators in bulk allegedly by furnishing fake ID proofs and then sold them to customers without necessary documents at a premium price, Joint Commissioner of Police, Thane Police, Ashutosh Dumbre told a press conference here.
"The SIM cards purchased were brought in use for anti-social activities and were being misused," he said.
On a tip off, police raided the house of one Siraj Ahmed Ansari (40), owner of Ashrafi Mobiles in Bhiwandi on January 21, and arrested him and a customer Dyanprakash Gupta, who was buying in bulk the SIM cards from Siraj without valid documents.

Based on the interrogation of Siraj, two activation officers of a mobile service provider company and three others were held yesterday.
Elucidating the modus operandi, Dumbre said Siraj, who operated from Bhiwandi, bought SIM cards in large numbers and had a pool of passport size pictures, fake Adhar card, voter ID card; all documents required to purchase a SIM card.

He used to randomly pick pictures from Facebook and used photoshop to make fake photo ID proofs out of it.
Siraj had as many as 470 activated SIM cards of different companies, the senior officer said, adding, police has seized over 49,500 photographs, 9,400 fake Aadhar card copies, 3,072 copies of fake voters ID cards, 1,987 customer order forms from him.

Police also impounded 11,345 activated SIM cards of different companies, 110 mobile handsets, 60 rubber stamps of different mobile companies, two computers and as many scanners and printers from the gang members.
A case been booked under IPC sections 420 (cheating), 465 (forgery), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged document or electronic record) rw 34 (common intention) against the seven people.