New Delhi: The home ministry on Wednesday informed the Parliament that more than 6.69 lakhs SIM cards and 1,32,000 IMEIs have been blocked by the government of India.
“Till November 15, 2024, more than 6.69 lakhs SIM cards and 1,32,000 IMEIs as reported by police authorities have been blocked by Government of India,” said Minister of State for Home Affairs, Bandi Sanjay Kumar in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha.
Admitting that cybercrime has become a major emerging threat that severely affect all sections of the people, Kumar informed that a state of the art centre, Cyber Fraud Mitigation Centre (CFMC) has been established at I4C where representatives of major banks, financial intermediaries, payment aggregators, telecom service providers, IT intermediaries and representatives of States and UTs law enforcement agency are working together for immediate action and seamless cooperation to tackle cybercrime.
“The Central Government and Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) have devised a system to identify and block incoming international spoofed calls displaying Indian mobile numbers that appear to be originating within India. Such international spoofed calls have been made by cyber-criminals in recent cases of fake digital arrests, FedEx scams, impersonation as government and police officials, etc. Directions have been issued to the TSPs for blocking of such incoming international spoofed calls,” he said.
Samanvaya platform (joint management information system) has been made operational from April 2022 to serve as a Management Information System (MIS) platform, data repository and a coordination platform for LEAs for cybercrime data sharing and analytics.
The system provides analytics based interstate linkages of crimes and criminals, involved in cybercrime complaints in various States and UTs.
“The module ‘Pratibimb’ maps locations of criminals and crime infrastructure on a map to give visibility to jurisdictional officers. The module also facilitates seeking and receiving of techno-legal assistance by Law Enforcement Agencies from I4C and other SMEs,” he said.
Kumar further informed that a suspect registry of identifiers of cyber criminals has been launched by I4C in September this year in collaboration with banks and financial institutions.
“The central government has introduced a new feature titled ‘Report and Check Suspect’ on https://cybercrime.gov.in. This facility provides citizens a search option to search I4C’s repository of identifiers of cyber criminals through ‘Suspect Search’,” he said.
The minister informed that seven Joint Cyber Coordination Teams (JCCTs) have been constituted for Mewat, Jamtara, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Visakhapatnam, and Guwahati under I4C covering the whole country based upon cybercrime hotspots and areas having multi jurisdictional issues by on boarding States and UTs to enhance the coordination framework among the Law Enforcement Agencies of the States and UTs.
