Bangladeshi SIM cards being sold in Bengal, difficult to track | Bangladeshi SIMs are being sold in Bengal, it is difficult to track them: Conversation on local calls instead of international, these SIMs are active up to five km within the border.

The cost of one SIM is up to Rs 5 thousand.

Place: Shrirampur village of Murshidabad district of West Bengal situated on the Bangladesh border. Time: 2:36 pm. At present a weekly market is organized here. It was here that we met local Mohammad Ashfaq. He had a keypad phone in his hand, through which he was repeatedly calling Bangladesh. When I asked about the call rate, he said – This is not an international call, it is a local call, because there is a Bangladeshi SIM in the phone. I do import-export work, for this I need a local SIM. When I asked – where did you get the SIM, he said – here. What do you want? I said- no. After this I left from there.

This SIM has become a headache for the Border Security Force (BSF) on the Bengal border adjacent to Bangladesh. After the coup in Bangladesh in August, buying and selling of external SIMs has started in Shrirampur. The networks of most of the telecom service providers in Bangladesh come within five kilometers of the Indian border. That means smugglers are talking on local calls between two countries.

A local police officer said that recently, when some smugglers were escaping to the Bangladesh border, one of their phones had fallen. It had a Bangladeshi SIM. Then we got information about foreign SIMs being active in Indian area. We currently do not have the technology to track them.

BSF’s South Bengal Frontier DIG NK Pandey said that tracking the smugglers using the Bangladeshi network has become the biggest problem. Meanwhile, according to Anil Kumar Sinha, DIG of Baharampur range of BSF, we have sent a company of soldiers from Nadia to Jangipur to increase surveillance.

The picture is of a local agent of smugglers, who showed the Bangladesh SIM to the Bhaskar team on the condition of not revealing his identity during the conversation.

Open bargaining… One SIM costs Rs 5,000, delivery will be done by a third party The agent told that in some other border villages such SIMs will also be available at grocery shops. The cost of this one SIM is Rs 5 thousand. If you want, tell the location, a third person will do the delivery there. There is no risk of getting caught in this.

4 ways to trace location, but all still fail A BSF officer associated with network technology, on the condition of anonymity, said that at present there are 4 ways to track the location of phones with Indian SIM.

First- triangulation. In this, the location is determined on the basis of the time taken by a signal to reach different mobile towers from the phone. Second- Tower and Analyser. In this, the last location of the active SIM is taken. Third- Equipment Identity Register. IMEI number is used in this. Fourth- Service Provider.

In this, based on the information of informers, the location is taken by sending the concerned numbers to the service providers. But, in case of foreign SIM, these four methods are not working.

The border is like this: only a pillar instead of a fence Murshidabad district has a 125 km long border with Bangladesh. Of these, 42 km is land, the remaining Padma river is the border. There is no fence for many kilometers. There is no fencing in 20.61 km of Nadia district adjacent to Murshidabad. In one and a half months, 52 infiltrators were caught here. Last Wednesday, along with 10 Bangladeshis, 5 Indian brokers were also caught.

Suspected infiltrators have colonized the entire village… Some local villagers said that due to Padma river, fencing could not be done from Nimtita to Khandua of Lalgola. Durlabhpur village is on the river bank. Illegal infiltrators have settled in a large area here. The way of living, speech and dress are similar, hence identification is not possible. Panchayats do not give information about them, because these people are related by kinship.