Begin forwarded message: From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: October 14, 2006 9:48:42 AM EDT To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx Cc: Esther Dyson <edyson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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 <edyson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: October 13, 2006 10:19:51 PM EDT To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx, ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 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 thecustomer 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 ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as suresh@xxxxxxxxxx To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ipArchives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting- people/
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