The Cyber Crime Wing of Tamil Nadu Police has blocked 19,654 mobile phone numbers which were repeatedly used by fraudsters to target gullible individuals. These numbers were blocked using a portal launched by Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
At present, most of the cyber crimes are committed through phishing, smishing and vishing that requests for KYC update, linking of Aadhaar and PAN. Mobile numbers are used by fraudsters to commit the crime.
Additional Director-General of Police(ADGP), Cyber Crime Wing, Sanjay Kumar, said: “Any phone number which is used for fraudulent calls will be blocked permanently. Now, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) of Ministry of Home Affairs has launched a central online portal for raising a request for blocking a SIM involved in the cyber crime. We forward the numbers especially used by fraudsters to dupe victims who lodged complaints with us to the portal. Then they will go to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and then they will be blocked.”
The State Nodal Officer Superintendent of Police–I is given access to raise the request for mobile number/SIM blocking in the National Cyber Crime Reporting (NCRP) Portal after ensuring proper verification of the mobile number’s that are involved in cyber crime.
The Tamil Nadu Cyber Crime Wing Headquarters, Chennai, has utilised this facility to the maximum since its inception. All the State nodal officers in India had started uploading the suspect mobile numbers in the NCRP portal. The mobile number/SIM blocking on NCRP Portal has been rolled out smoothly and all States/Union Territories and DoT have been integrated.
D. Ashok Kumar, Superintendent of Police, Cyber Crime Wing, said: “We have blocked or deactivated 19,654 mobile numbers which were used for fraudulent activities.”
The fraudsters would not get new sim cards as they had been identified or tracked by the Department of Telecommunications through Digital intelligence unit and also by Tamil Nadu State Cyber Crime Wing.
So far, Tamil Nadu has uploaded 20,197 mobile numbers for blocking and out of which 19,654 mobile numbers have been blocked in the last 15 days. Tamil Nadu has uploaded the maximum number of mobile numbers for blocking.