Bengaluru police get over 15,000 SIM cards used by fraudsters to cheat city residents blocked
Bengaluru: The city police have identified and blocked in the last three weeks more than 15,000 SIM cards used by fraudsters to cheat residents of Bengaluru, in a bid to curb cybercrime.
The police action came after a surge in cases of cybercrime registered across its city limits, they said on Saturday.
According to the police, a special drive was started on August 16 with an aim to check incidents of cybercrime in the city. As part of the initiative, the police have managed to identify and get blocked 15,378 SIM cards from August 16 to September 7.
Most of these SIM cards were found to be operational in northern India and were used by fraudsters to cheat residents of Bengaluru through various fraudulent modus operandi.
"Since January this year, there has been a surge in cases related to cybercrimes and we received a lot of complaints where the victims shared contact numbers through which they were approached by fraudsters with various schemes and were ultimately duped by them. So, we identified these numbers, verified it and got them blocked immediately," he said.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Command Centre) Ravindra Gadadi said a single SIM card can be used by a fraudster to cheat many innocent people. So even if that single SIM card gets blocked immediately, then he can't reuse the same SIM to target other victims.
This way it helps in reducing the number of victims and also brings down the number of cases.
It's an ongoing drive and as and when we identify such suspicious numbers, we will get such SIM cards blocked, he noted.
The police are also analysing case files of previous years to identify more such SIM cards that were used for carrying out fraudulent activities so that they could get them blocked too if still in use for the same purpose.
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Congress using hijab issue to pacify minority anger, alleges Karnataka LoP R Ashoka
Bengaluru: Leader of Opposition in the Assembly R. Ashoka has accused the Congress government of using the hijab issue to placate what he described as discontent among minority voters after the Davanagere by-election.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Ashoka alleged that the state government, instead of addressing issues such as price rise, corruption, farmers’ distress and law and order, was attempting to retain its minority vote base by reviving the hijab issue.
Referring to the 2022 dress code introduced by the BJP government, which prohibited hijab in schools and colleges, Ashoka said the Karnataka High Court had upheld the policy and emphasised the importance of discipline in educational institutions.
He questioned the Congress government’s move to revisit the issue and asked whether setting aside the court-backed policy to benefit one community could be described as secularism.
Ashoka further alleged that while the government was willing to permit hijab, it continued to prohibit saffron shawls.
He accused the government of dividing students on religious lines rather than treating schools and colleges as spaces of equality.
Drawing a comparison with Mamata Banerjee’s government in West Bengal, Ashoka claimed that excessive appeasement politics had harmed the state and warned that the Congress in Karnataka could face a similar political response.
He said voters in Karnataka would teach the Congress a lesson for what he termed “vote-bank politics” and for compromising constitutional and judicial principles.
