DoT weeds out 51,260 fake SIM cards in Odisha to curb cyber crimes

Bhubaneswar (Odisha) [India], May 9 : The Department of Telecommunication on Tuesday said it weeded out and disconnected 51,260 fake SIM cards of different Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) in Odisha to curb the menace of cyber crimes. These SIMs were non-bonafide mobile connections.

The Department of Telecommunication has conceptualised and implemented artificial intelligence-based facial recognition tool called ASTR for telecom SIM subscriber verification with a vision to analyse, identify and weed out fake/forged, non-bonafide mobile connections for curbing the menace of cyber crimes.

According to a statement from the Additional DG Telecom Odisha Office, ASTR analyses the combined subscriber base of all the telecom service providers (TSPs) and detects non-bonafide mobile connections.

It said the system uses subscriber images and compares the same with other subscriber images and the output is generated in groups of similar images with different images with different names of the same person.

According to the statement, ASTR has identified 52,088 suspected mobile connections issued by different telecom operators in Odisha. As per the directions of DoT Odisha, these suspected mobile connections were verified by the concerned telecom operators and as a result 51,260 connections were found non-bonafide and were disconnected.