IN December 2011, I subscribed to a sim from a network’s sales office, Block 13-B, University Road, Karachi.

The salesman entered my particulars in his computer, took my original CNIC, made a copy thereof, and got my signature and thumb impression on the computerised printout.

He advised me to take another one free for which I had to sign and thumb-impress another printout. I requested him that the sim be enabled to work in Bahrain. The salesman confirmed it had been arranged.

I brought the sim to Bahrain where it worked. In January-March 2014 my wife used it in Karachi. She got a call from the network provider that the sim was not registered in her name and she had to come to the office for registration. She told the caller that the sim was not in her name, but in her husband’s name.

Last May I apprised the PTA chairman in order to get a complaint number, but never found any progress. On May 22, the network’s customer care team responded, saying it would investigate the matter within 48 hours. Those 48 hours are yet to end.

If this sim is not in my name or stands ‘unregistered’ in the record of network, the question then is: where are the copies of my CNIC, signatures and thumbprints? For more than two years this sim was in use, its every activity is on record, how then did it remain active without being issued by the network?

This is why no mobile network ever provides a proper receipt or the customer’s copy of agreement/application form signed by the subscriber so that there remains no proof of one’s claim, besides facilitating ‘tax evasion’ by the companies.

I suspect sims are issued on the basis of photocopies, signatures and thumbprints of genuine applicants, but the record of ‘some’ is destroyed so that the activated sims find their way ‘to some other places’.

The problem of illegal sims will not end unless the salesman also signs and thumb-prints the sales form of each sim sold, one NCR copy is returned to the customer and one sent to Nadra or the PTA.

Muhammad Javed

Bahrain

Published in Dawn, January 25th, 2015

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