The government said on Thursday it will discontinue the sale of SIM cards in bulk, and only allow business connections to companies through proper KYC process.
As part of the Telecom Reforms, a vendor selling SIM cards will also be verified by the police to be made accountable, s and could be penalised up to ₹10 lakh in case of any wrong doing. However, providing nine SIMs to an individual buyer for personal use will continue.
“There are significant changes that are being made in the reforms. We have noticed that the point of sale (SIM seller) has a big complicity and focusses on only selling maximum number of SIMs and don’t go through a proper channel of verifying the customers. So, to control that menace, we are making police and biometrics verifications mandatory,” Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Telecommunications and Electronics and Information Technology, told reporters here.
He said there are 10 lakh SIM dealers and they will be given sufficient time for police verification. “Second, we have seen that many of the customers buy SIMs in bulk...80 per cent of them are genuine who require for their businesses/ corporates, and for some big events. But the misuse of those 20 per cent is quite big because they buy SIMs in bulk and use the SIM-Box through which they make several automated calls. That’s why after studying/ analysing these, we have decided to discontinue bulk SIM-buying,” he said.
Vaishnaw said the government was hopeful that these two reforms will bring in significant changes in cyber frauds and user protection.
He said there has been a lot of work in progress and KYC, most of which are already in digital form, would become fully digital from September-end.
“We will bring bring out one more circular to mandate the digital KYC as part of the regular license process...another change we have brought in the process is that whoever brings Aadhaar, the QR code can be scanned to get the KYC done instantly. We will make it mandatory by giving a legal background. This will reduce the fraud,” he added.
Giving some data over the last three months, Vaishnaw said that 52 lakh fraudulent mobile connections have been disconnected, 300 FIRs registered, 17,000 mobile phones deactivated, 66,000 WhatsApp accounts disabled, and three-lakh stolen mobile phones handed back to customers.