NEW DELHI: In a major crackdown aimed at dismantling the technical backbone of organised cybercrime, CBI arrested a senior official of a telecom service provider in connection with its investigation into the illegal bulk sale of SIM cards used by scammers.The accused was identified as Binu Vidhyadharan, who worked as an area sales manager (Delhi) with Vodafone, the probe agency informed.TOI first reported in Dec that CBI was investigating a large-scale module through which over 20,000 SIM cards were procured, and a majority of them found their way to cyber criminals.CBI uncovered an organised phishing network, operating from Delhi-NCR and Chandigarh, which provided bulk SMS services to cyber criminals, including foreign actors targeting Indian citizens.The module procured around 21,000 SIM cards in violation of DoT rules, to facilitate the transmission of bulk SMS used by cyber criminals for sending phishing messages. Three persons, including a channel partner of the telecom service provider, were arrested in Dec and are currently in judicial custody.The role of Vodafone’s area sales manager allegedly came to the fore during the probe. Inquiry revealed that the suspect was actively involved in facilitating the fraudulent issuance of SIM cards in bulk. “He arranged dummy individuals, falsely projecting them as employees of M/s Lord Mahavira Services India Pvt Ltd, and submitted their documents to complete the KYC formalities. Members of a family residing in Bengaluru were among those arranged by the official and shown as employees of the accused company,” an agency spokesperson said.Copies of Aadhaar cards of these persons were recovered from the possession of the accused official. In 2024-2025 alone, the scammers obtained 7,721 SIM connections. The accused, CBI found, allegedly provided false end-user lists and used the same IDs to issue multiple SIM cards. For example, 90 SIMs were issued for just 10 people, and 1,000 numbers for only 143 people across the country.The SIM cards obtained through these fraudulent means were subsequently used to operate the phishing ecosystem exposed during the investigation. In this case, these SIM cards were controlled through an online platform to send messages in bulk, offering fake loans, investment opportunities and other financial benefits, with the aim of stealing personal and banking details.CBI’s probe also revealed that some of the numbers or SIMs operated across 203 to 387 IMEIs and generated 1-second automated calls-patterns consistent with SIM Box operations, IMEI tampering and M2M communication, all prohibited by DoT guidelines. A SIM box is a device capable of holding hundreds of SIM cards and can disguise international calls and bypass telecom rules.
