Bengaluru police block more than 15,000 SIM cards used by fraudsters

In the past three weeks, city police in Bengaluru have identified and deactivated over 15,000 SIM cards employed by fraudsters to to cheat residents, in a bid to curb cybercrime.

The police action came after a surge in cases of cybercrime registered across its city limits, they said on Saturday (September 9).

According to the police, a special drive was started on August 16 with an aim to check incidents of cybercrime in the city. As part of the initiative, the police have managed to identify and get 15,378 SIM cards blocked from August 16 to September 7.

Most of these SIM cards were found to be operational in northern India and were used by fraudsters to cheat residents of Bengaluru through various fraudulent modus operandi.

"Since January this year, there has been a surge in cases related to cybercrimes and we received a lot of complaints where the victims shared contact numbers through which they were approached by fraudsters with various schemes and were ultimately duped by them. So, we identified these numbers, verified it and got them blocked immediately," he said.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Command Centre) Ravindra Gadadi said a single SIM card can be used by a fraudster to cheat many innocent people. So even if that single SIM card gets blocked immediately, then he can't reuse the same SIM to target other victims. This way it helps in reducing the number of victims and also brings down the number of cases.

It's an ongoing drive and as and when we identify such suspicious numbers, we will get such SIM cards blocked, he noted.

The police are also analysing case files of previous years to identify more such SIM cards which were used for carrying out fraudulent activities so that they could get them blocked too if still in use for the same purpose.

(With agency inputs)