Representative image.

(This story originally appeared in on Apr 30, 2017)

BENGALURU: The Central Crime Branch (CCB) has busted a scam by arresting a man who supplied fake documents to shopkeepers selling SIM cards of various service providers and activating the SIMs based on those documents for just Rs 100 each.

Police were in shock when they raided an office near police quarters on Double Road in Shanthinagar as they found more than one lakh fake documents with the arrested man, which he used to activate the SIM cards.

The raid was conducted jointly by City Intelligence and CCB. Based on a tip off, the police landed in 34-year-old Dheeraj Jain’s office, named AMD Creation, on Friday afternoon and caught him red-handed with the fake documents which used to activate SIM cards which he sold for just Rs 100.

Dheeraj sold at least 30,000 to 40,000 fake documents per month to various shopkeepers who were in contact with him.

He had employed around five persons to make the fake documents and certificates.

Two deputy commissioners of police, HD Anand Kumar and T Shreedhar, under the guidance of additional commissioner of police (crime) S Ravi, conducted the raid on Dheeraj’s office.

Dheeraj earlier worked in a SIM cards distribution agency. The agency collected documents from shopkeepers and activated the SIM cards. A copy of documents was scanned and stored in their system. Dheeraj had downloaded all the documents provided by the customers and stored them in his hard drive.

He had morphed the faces of people on the documents like voter’s identity card, driving license, Aadhaar card and other such identity documents with the help of Photoshop and sold them to shopkeepers to activate the SIM cards.

Police seized computers, hard disk and other evidences from Dheeraj’s office along with the fake documents.

A case will be taken up against Dheeraj for forgery and cheating. The police suspect that a lot of anti-social elements, who could not use proof of identity for fear of law enforcement agencies, have benefitted from this scam.

THE MODUS OPERANDI

If a person did not have any documents as proof of identity, and still wanted to buy a SIM card, all that the person had to do was to visit any of shopkeepers in Dheeraj’s network and tell him he didn’t have the documents.

The shopkeeper told the customer that he would charge extra for providing him an activated SIM card and approach Dheeraj who uses to send them fake documents that were stored in his hard drive and put the face of the person wanting to buy the activated SIM card on that document. But this was done without changing any other details in the documents; and then the SIM cards were sold, HD Anand Kumar explained.

