Navi Mumbai: Officials from the Navi Mumbai Crime Branch Unit II have arrested a man for allegedly forging documents for a Tata Docomo distributor, who used them to activate SIM cards in fake names to meet his monthly target of 2,100 connections.
The accused, Shareef Hanif Khan (29), a resident of Ulwe, was arrested on Saturday along with his friend Ramvinay Surendra Yadav (24), a resident of Vashi Naka in Chembur.
The police had earlier arrested Vijay Hariprasad Yadav (27), owner of V.J. Mobiles in Khanda Colony and a Tata Docomo SIM card distributor, and Satish Harichandra Gaikwad (32), who worked as area manager for a private company on contract with Tata Docomo.
The method
Khan runs a mobile accessories and photocopy shop at Ulwe. “We suspect that he must have kept extra copies of the ID cards of customers and used them to forge documents by editing the photographs, names and other details,” Assistant Police Inspector Subhash Pujari said. The police have seized six Aadhaar card copies from Khan, but he had deleted the scanned copies from his hard disk. “We have sent the hard disk to the forensic team to retrieve the deleted data,” Mr. Pujari said.
Khan lives with his pregnant wife, who is a homeopathy doctor, and two daughters aged eight and two years old respectively.
After making the fake documents, Khan would sell them to his friend Ramvinay Yadav for ₹5 each. Ramvinay Yadav, a neighbour of Gaikwad, sold them to him for ₹7 each. Gaikwad in turn sold them for the same price to Vijay Yadav, who submitted them to Tata Docomo to activate the SIM cards.
The motive
Vijay Yadav needed to meet a monthly target of 2,100 connections to earn a commission of ₹15 per connection. “If the target was not met, the commission earned was less, depending on the number of SIMs activated,” Mr. Pujari said, adding that more distributors may have bought documents from Khan to meet their targets.
After Vijay Yadav and Gaikwad’s arrest, the police had recovered 1,120 SIM cards activated over a period of three months, eight mobile phone handsets used for the activation, 13 prepaid application forms and 16 rubber stamps in the names of various mobile shops. “We found SIM cards activated in the last three months, now we will investigate about the SIM cards activated before that,” Senior Police Inspector Nivrutti Kolhatkar said.
All the accused have been remanded in police custody till April 20.
