75% SIM cards are fake: Tarana

State Minister for Post and Telecommunication Tarana Halim today said around 75 percent out of the one crore SIM cards which have been verified so far were not registered properly.

The fake SIM (subscriber identity module) cards are hampering government efforts to check crimes committed using mobile phones, she said.

The registrations of one crore SIM cards out of nearly 13 crore mobile phone subscribers in the country have been verified.

“We have found around 75 percent of the verified SIM cards are fake,” Tarana said at a press conference after a meeting with high officials of mobile phone operators at her ministry office today.

“We found around 14,117 registered SIM cards against a single National Identity (NID) card,” she said.

There are 12.87 crore active mobile subscribers in the country of different mobile phone operators, according to latest statistics of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC).

The six mobile phone operators have so far submitted information of only 99, 92,500 SIM cards to the Election Commission office under its NID project for verification.

Expressing her disappointment over the slow process of the mobile phone operators, Tarana Halim said they have so far found that only 23, 43,680 SIM cards were registered properly.

The verification of mobile SIM cards started from September 13.

The decision for re-registration and verification was made as the government decided to prepare a new database of subscribers to check criminal activities through cellular networks.