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 While the Delhi police takes mobile fraud seriously, with a special cell being set up to curb SIM cloning, it treats cases of mobile theft lightly and is reluctant to register cases of lost mobiles.
No FIR
MiD DAY staffer Prawesh Lama lost his cell phone in Tilak Marg. When he went to the Tilak Marg police station to lodge a complaint, he was greeted by a lady police officer at the reception desk.
The officer explained that an FIR is never registered in such cases. "It is difficult to find mobile phones once they are stolen. You have to write a complaint, which will ensure that no one will misuse your phone."
Legal hassle
The lady also said that registering an FIR would mean numerous visits to the court and hiring a lawyer. "The time and money it will take after registering an FIR will be more than the cost of the mobile phone. It is not worth it," she added.
The correspondent only managed to file a complaint and returned with a stamped letter. A police officer admitted that finding a mobile phone is virtually impossible unless the customer knows the EMI, which is the code recorded by mobile companies which identifies phones.
What is Mobile phone cloning?
Cell phone cloning is copying the identity of one mobile telephone to another mobile telephone.
Usually this is done for the purpose of making fraudulent telephone calls. The bill for the calls goes to the legitimate subscriber.
This made cloning very popular in areas with large immigrant populations, where the cost to “call home” was very steep. The cloner is also able to make effectively anonymous calls, which attracts another group of interested users.
How to prevent cloning?
Limit your roaming: Roaming usually defeats the use of Personal Identification Numbers (PINs). Cloners prefer roaming phones for this reason and they target airport parking lots, airport access roads, and rural interstates. Roaming also makes it more difficult for some cellular carriers to use fraud-detection programs to monitor an account and shut it down when fraud is detected.
One should review all bills and report every erroneous call, which one has not made, to the service provider. There are two types of cloning:
1. Outright theft of the phone's ESN/MIN is most common these days. A bill will reflect hundreds, even thousands of bogus calls.
2. The other type of cloning is called tumbling. In this process cloned phone uses a different ESN/MIN for each call. A bill might have only one bogus call this month, none next month, but three calls the month after that. The phone has still been cloned and fraud is occurring.
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