Seven first information reports (FIRs) have been registered against 20 telecom points of sales (PoS) agencies or franchisees while FIRs are pending in four other complaints by telecom service providers (TSPs) against 360 PoS agencies for issuing mobile SIM cards on forged documents, after the department of telecommunications (DoT) deactivated in April around 2.3 lakh mobile phone connections in Bihar and Jharkhand of the total 2.6 lakh flagged suspicious, officials said on Tuesday.
FIRs are pending against 357 PoS agencies under Patna’s Rupaspur police station (PS) area. One such complaint by Vodafone Idea Limited accounts for 323 PoS agencies and another by Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL) is against 34 PoS agencies in Patna, said BM Patel, DoT’s director (compliance), Bihar.
FIRs are also pending on RJIL complaint against three PoS agencies in Araria’s Madanpur PS and Jokihat PS area, he said.
Three of the seven FIRs registered so far are against five PoS agencies under Patna’s Patliputra police station (PS) area and one FIR at Sachivalaya PS is against 10 PoS agencies. An FIR each has also been registered at Gaya, and Ranchi’s Kotwali PS and Hazaribagh PS.
The service providers had lodged the police complaints between April and mid-May, said Patel.
Nayyar Hasnain Khan, additional director-general of police, who heads Bihar’s economics offence unit, said FIRs should have been registered in all such cases by now.
“The station house officers (SHOs) of the police stations are duty bound to register FIRs in all such cases, especially when telecom service providers have already given written complaints. We will take up the cases you’ve pointed out with the senior superintendent of police (SSP), Patna, and the SP of Araria. We will take prompt corrective actions if we find any willful delay or negligence of our field staff in lodging FIR,” said Khan.
The Patna high court had also instructed the police and the telecom service providers to pursue legal recourse in case they find any violation of the TRAI guidelines, he added.
“We take any such violation (of TRAI guidelines) seriously, as they lead to illegal activities,” said Khan.
DoT special director general (DG) Girijesh Kumar Mishra said the scanning of 870 million mobile connections in India was done through the government’s artificial intelligence (AI)-based facial recognition software in March.
“The DoT used the AI algorithm on 870 million mobile connections, of which 40 lakh were flagged to be suspicious in India. Around 36 lakh such connections have been disconnected. This is the first time such an exercise has been undertaken using AI at the pan-India level. It will also help curtail cybercrime,” he said.
The DoT has blocked these numbers as they were procured with illegal documents, said Mishra.
According to Mishra, among the mobile connections flagged as suspicious were those having similar photographs but different names on government identity (ID) documents furnished at the time of taking a mobile SIM; those having the same ID but different photograph; and even those having someone else’s ID and photograph by fabricating documents.
“The TSPs have also de-franchised 2,904 PoS agents, based on our findings, and they are in the process of lodging FIRs against them,” Mishra said.
Bihar accounts for 87% of the 2.30 lakh disconnected mobile connections, while the remaining 13% are from Jharkhand. As many as 85% of the 2,904 PoS agents de-franchised are from Bihar, added Mishra.
The DoT detected 0.38% connections suspicious out of the 70 million mobile subscriber data it analysed in March against a total 110 million mobile subscriber base in Bihar and Jharkhand, officials said.
As many as 30,000 of the 2.60 lakh connections flagged suspicious were later found to be genuine after re-verification, said Mishra, adding the remaining were disconnected.
According to Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister for communications, railways and electronics & information technology, one person was found to have 6,900 connections, while yet another had 5,200 connections. More than 40 lakh fraudulent connections have been identified and over 36 lakh such connections disconnected so far, he added.
He made the remarks in New Delhi on Tuesday during the pan-India launch of the Sanchar Saathi, an integrated citizen-centric portal.
The portal allows mobile consumers to block or trace lost mobile phones, check the genuineness of devices while buying a new or old mobile phone, know the mobile connections issued in their name and get disconnected from the connections they do not require.
India has emerged as the second largest telecom ecosystem in the world with a subscriber base of 1,170.75 million (source: TRAI subscriber report of January 2023).
