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B'luru airport cops bust SIM card racket

Hameed Ashraf | NT

Bengaluru: The Bengaluru Airport police have registered a case after busting a pre-activated SIM card smuggling racket from India to foreign countries through a private courier service.

According to sources, two persons had used a private courier service to send a parcel to Cambodia on February 2.

During checks, the scanner through which parcels are scanned detected the presence of the SIM cards which turned the officials suspicious.

However the matter was being internally debated for over two months on how to handle the issue.

Recently the police at the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) initiated an investigation and zeroed in on two persons who attempted to smuggle the SIM cards, suspected to be used for illegal activities.

In the first case, the complainant, Ashik Sony, working for a courier firm, found a parcel concealing 24 SIM cards.

The parcel was booked in the name of Srinivasa Rao from Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, and was being sent to Taiwan. Similarly, another parcel concealing 114 SIM cards booked in the name of Syed from Chennai was booked for Cambodia.

The Airport police have registered a case under the Telecommunications Act. In March this year, the Delhi police arrested four persons for allegedly sending hundreds of international SIM cards every month to Vietnam.

The police recovered 500 SIM cards in three packages covered in carbon paper.