One flagged mobile number on a police mapping portal has unravelled a suspected SIM card supply network stretching across two Rajasthan districts, with Anandpuri Police confirming six arrests after a case that began with a single subscriber who had no idea his identity was being used for cybercrime.
The investigation started when the Banswara Cyber Cell received an alert through the Pratibimb portal flagging a suspicious mobile number linked to fraudulent activity. Verification revealed the SIM card had been registered in the name of Jitendra Tabiyar, a resident of Navatavra Chhaja who had never used the number for any criminal purpose himself.
A Family Connection Opens the Network
When questioned, Jitendra told police that his maternal cousin, Vimal, had asked him to obtain four SIM cards under the pretext of needing them for personal work, a request he had complied with without suspecting its actual purpose. Vimal allegedly repeated this approach with several acquaintances, gradually assembling a collection of SIM cards registered in other people’s names while retaining possession of them himself.
Jitendra’s subsequent complaint led to a case being registered at Anandpuri Police Station, from which investigators expanded their inquiry and arrested Vimal Katara, a resident of Poliwada, along with Bhagwan Patel of Kheda Samor in neighbouring Dungarpur district. During further questioning, Patel allegedly named four additional individuals, his son Rohit Patidar, along with Bhavesh Patidar, Dinesh Patidar and Lokesh Kalal, as recipients of SIM cards obtained through Vimal.
This layered structure, in which identity documents are gathered through personal relationships before being distributed for criminal use, reflects a pattern law enforcement has traced repeatedly across India. Fraudulently registered SIM cards create precisely the kind of gap investigators describe as most damaging to early-stage cybercrime tracing, since a number’s registered subscriber often has no connection to whoever is actually operating it.
How Pratibimb Closed the Identification Gap
The portal that first flagged the case is part of a nationwide system developed by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, designed to project mobile numbers associated with cybercrime onto a geographic information system map, giving investigating agencies visibility into where suspicious numbers are physically operating in real time. According to figures presented to the Lok Sabha, the platform has already assisted in more than six thousand arrests nationally and identified over seventeen thousand criminal linkages, underscoring its growing role in cases that would previously have stalled at the identification stage.
In the Anandpuri case, the four Patidar and Kalal suspects allegedly attempted to evade arrest by switching off their phones and fleeing to Ahmedabad once they learned of Bhagwan Patel’s detention. Investigators tracked them down using a combination of technical inputs and conventional investigative work, ultimately arresting all four in Gujarat and recovering four mobile phones and their associated SIM cards.
The Risk Hidden in a Borrowed Identity
Police have not yet determined the full extent of criminal activity conducted through the network’s SIM cards, though such numbers are commonly deployed for banking fraud, OTP theft and social engineering schemes targeting victims who have no connection to the original subscriber. Investigators continue examining digital evidence recovered from the suspects’ phones to establish how many victims may have been affected and where the proceeds of any fraud ultimately moved.
The case carries a pointed warning for anyone asked to obtain a SIM card, bank account or similar document on another person’s behalf, even by a trusted relative or acquaintance. Once such an identity document is linked to criminal activity, the original, unwitting subscriber can find themselves entangled in a police investigation despite having no knowledge of how the number was actually used, a legal complication that Anandpuri’s six arrests illustrate can take months of investigation to fully untangle.
