more on Pre-paid mobile phones

Begin forwarded message:

From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email protected]>
Date: October 14, 2006 9:48:42 AM EDT
To: [email protected]
Cc: Esther Dyson <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Pre-paid mobile phones

Not because of that actually

The physical verification of address part - that's because a racket was
busted where some people were stealing people's IDs and buying several
thousand SIMs using those IDs.  Some of these SIMs were then being sold
  to criminals and scam artists.

The others (postpaid sims, where you get a bill at the end of the month)
were being sold to various deadbeats, who'd make free calls for a month
and then some more days, till the service was cut off for non payment.

Cops trying to trace the owner of a phone that was used to make a ransom
demand homed in on a guy who was a laborer on a construction site (or
something similar) .. and then searched around, found that the guy had
over 3000 phones apparently registered to him.

This led to the arrest of a couple of cellphone store owners, and these
requirements were then put in place (at least the "insist on ID and
verification of ID when you buy a SIM").

David Farber wrote:

> From: Esther Dyson <[email protected]>
> Date: October 13, 2006 10:19:51 PM EDT
> To: [email protected], [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [IP] Pre-paid mobile phones
>
>  I  don;t know about the US, but it *is* a legal requirement in India,
> where cell phones were recently used to set off bombs.  (As I heard  
> it,
> one of the bombs contained a SIM chip and was wired to go off when the
> SIM chip was called.)
>
> So now, there are complicated rules concerning the purchase of phones
> and prepaid time.  The merchant is supposed to physically verify the
> customer's address by going to the address listed and seeing if the
> customer is there.  Just imagine: A whole new business-process  
> market !
>
> Of course, that doesn't mean that ID is actually required in practice:
> Many companies buy large quantities of chips or time and hand them out
> liberally to employees.  And I'm sure that the address-verification
> services are not all reliable. Kinda like the TSA.
>
> Esther Dyson
>
>
>
>
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