In a major action, the Department of Telecommunication has disconnected 21,031 SIMs taken using forged documents.
The Maharashtra Licensed Service Areas (LSA) carried out the analysis for its subscriber database and has identified a total of 21031 SIM which were taken on forged documents.
“Action is being taken to book the culprits and SIM sellers who are involved in such fraudulent activities. Such PoS/SIM sellers are being blacklisted by and across Service providers. Police complaints are being made for further investigation and taking necessary action on the culprits,” DoT officials said.
It is well known that SIMs bought using forged documents are involved in the majority of cybercrimes.
“Such is the expertise level of fraudsters that they have created fake proof of identity / address documents, which can never be detected by human beings by analyzing a single case in isolation,” officials said.
The DoT had taken up the challenge for preventing cybercrimes by conceptualizing and implementing an innovative and indigenous Artificial Intelligence (AI) based and Facial Recognition powered solution (ASTR) – the NextGen platform for detecting and weeding out fake/forged SIMs.
The vision of the ASTR project is to analyze the whole subscriber base of all telecom Service Providers (TSPs) combined and cleanse the mobile subscriber database by identifying non-bonafide mobile numbers. The system uses subscriber images and a subscriber database provided by the Telecom Subscriber Providers (TSP) to DoT, to detect the same face and different names.