四人因伪造SIM卡被捕

<\/div><\/div>Police said the four accused, Tapan Naik, Susant Kumar Biswal, Bibhuti Bhusan Mohanty and Banambar Das, allegedly sold SIM cards by accepting forged documents from people.

In the evening, police raided several cellphone shops in Mancheswar, Nayapalli, Chandrasekharpur and areas under Capital police limits. They detained 40 people and seized several pre-activated SIM cards.

Police recently found that a murder accused purchased a pre-activated SIM card, which was registered in the name of a fictitious person. The shopkeeper later sold the SIM to the accused without accepting any documents. Such complaints were frequently made during interaction of police with college students and citizens in the past few weeks.

\"Pre-activated SIM cards are easily available in the market, mostly near educational institutions. Two months ago, I received pesky calls from a number. I lodged a complaint at Khandagiri police<\/a> station. But police said identity of the SIM card's owner could not be established,\" said a girl of a private college during interaction with police recently. \"Police said they even could not trace the person, who sold the SIM card,\" she said.

Official sources said the department of telecom has issued guidelines that the SIM cards of customers should be activated only after conducting verification of documents. The direction was issued as it was found that a large number of criminals were using SIM cards by submitting forged documents to conceal their identities. Going by the modus operandi, vendors forge documents of a few customers, who bought SIM cards from them. Using these fake documents, they activate SIM cards and sell them to customers without documents at exorbitant rates.
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