In a significant breakthrough against cybercrime, Delhi Police have dismantled an illegal mobile manufacturing and IMEI tampering unit operating in Karol Bagh. The raid, carried out under Operation Cyberhawk, led to the arrest of five men and the recovery of 1,826 mobile phones along with laptops containing IMEI tampering software.
IMEI is a unique fifteen digit identity number assigned to every mobile device. It helps in identifying and tracking a phone. The accused were found altering this number to prevent detection of devices that were stolen or later used in cyberfraud.
The police seized finished and semi finished smartphones, keypad phones, specialised tampering software, IMEI scanners, thousands of mobile body parts, and printed IMEI labels. Officers from the Karol Bagh police station had been tracking suspicious mobile activity in the Beadonpura area for the past fifteen days. Regular inputs indicated that an illegal phone assembly and IMEI altering operation was being run from the fourth floor of a building there.
Once the information was confirmed, a team was directed to catch the group while the activity was underway. On twenty November, the police raided Aditya Electronics and Accessories, located on the top floor of a commercial building in Beadonpura.
Inside the premises, officers found five individuals assembling mobile phones by fitting old motherboards into new body parts. IMEI changing software was active on their laptops and phones with new altered IMEIs were being packed for sale. The arrested individuals have been identified as Ashok Kumar, Ramnarayan, Dharmendra Kumar, Deepanshu and Deepak.
The group told police that they bought old and damaged motherboards and stolen phones at cheap rates from scrap dealers around Delhi. They sourced new phone bodies from China through spare parts suppliers. Using software such as WRITEIMEI 0.2.2 and WRITEIMEI 2.0, they created phones that would not appear in official manufacturing databases.
These counterfeit devices were then sold in Karol Bagh, Gaffar Market and several other mobile markets across Delhi NCR. The unit operated on a large scale, moving hundreds of phones every month. Most buyers were criminals seeking untraceable devices.
Police are now investigating how the spare parts were imported and identifying the end users of these altered phones.
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