KARACHI, June 21: Every citizen knows that he is innocent of any alleged crime until proved guilty in a court of law. But what happens if there is active evidence linking him to a crime, such as a SIM card registered in his name that was used for criminal purposes? Consider the case of Ashraf Ali, who went to a Ufone service centre for number portability and found, to his shock, that at least 19 cell phone connections had been issued against his Identity Card Number (NIC).
Alarmed over the discovery, Mr Ali advised members of his family to have their NIC numbers checked. Subsequently, his brother-in-law found that Mobilink had issued over two dozen connections against his identity card. Even these details could be retrieved only through a contact in the cellular mobile telephone operator (CMTO).
While Mr Ali’s family have managed to straighten their records by submitting applications with their CMTOs, it is entirely likely that thousands of subscribers remain unaware of the possibility that dozens of cell phone connections may have been registered against their identity cards. And if one of those SIMS is subsequently found to have been used in criminal or terrorist activities, the innocent subscriber – whose only crime is that his NIC was misused without his knowledge – becomes a soft target for law enforcement agencies. Before the name of such an unfortunate is cleared, he or she will already have been put through the wringer.
That cell phones are regularly misused to a greater or lesser extent is evident from the fact that the Citizen’s Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) receives 10 to 15 complaints a day regarding obnoxious calls from an untraceable number. And kidnap victim Dr Shabbir Nawaz, who was kept in captivity for 25 days, says that his kidnappers carried around a thousand or more SIMs in a sack.
“They were in constant communication with their accomplices through these connections,” he told this reporter after his release, “and at the end of each conversation they would change the SIM and store the old one in a specially-designed roll.”
According to an inside source in one of the country’s largest cellular companies, unethical sales promotions and practices such as sub-letting pre-paid SIM cards has to some extent led to the spread of undocumented SIM cards.
“One cell phone operator’s sales promotion campaign for pre-paid SIM cards envisaged such incentives as automatically crediting a commission into the account of the sale source every time the subscriber loaded a scratch card,” he told Dawn. “Cell phone companies are adding new codes for their services because of such blind sales of pre-paid connections, known in-house as punni sales.”
The source claimed that should the office of any call-phone dealer or franchise be searched unannounced, several sacks of copies of NIC cards could be recovered.
According to guidelines issued by the regulatory body, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), no more than five connections can be issued against one NIC number. The reality, however, is very different.
Data obtained by one cellular phone company watchdog shows that as many as 35,4177 connections from the same cellular mobile operator have been issued against a single NIC number. An official remarked that even 8,636 connections against one NIC number, usually that of a franchisee, is “not a big deal”.
CPLC chief Sharifuddin Memon says that the only solution lies in delivering SIM cards to the home address of the buyer, as is the case with credit cards. Meanwhile, PTA chairman Maj-Gen (Retd.) Shahzada Alam Malik last week directed all cellular mobile operators to ensure that their franchises adopted proper procedures before issuing new mobile connections, and said that any franchise neglecting to implement the rules would face strict disciplinary action, including cancellation of the franchise. According to these directives, customers wanting to purchase a SIM card would be required to fill out a customers’ agreement form.
However, the fact is that cellular mobile operators enjoy considerable clout in the corridors of power and are able to pay large fines imposed by the regulating authority. Whether these instructions are actually followed, remains to be seen.
