Here is good news for over 50 Mumbaikar, who lost their mobile phone while travelling by train in the recent past. GRP Mumbai recovered over 50 such phones from out of Maharashtra including 26 from UP, 8 from Bihar and 8 from Karnataka. According to GRP Mumbai process of contacting these commuters (whose phones were stolen) is already started.
"We were lucky because the IMEI number of the phone, which was tracked down by the Vidyaranyapuram police, was not tampered with," said an officer of Mumbai GRP.
Now, GRP has the Herculean task of identifying the owners of the stolen mobile phones. “We already started to collect details of lost phones from various government railway police stations to track down the owners,” said another officer of Mumbai GRP.
"Our team spent more than a week in remote villages of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Karnataka and MP, facing opposition from villagers and language hurdles, to recover over 50 phones stolen from Mumbai trains. In each case, the phone had been sold at cheap rates to an impoverished individual" said a senior officer of GRP Mumbai, who is heading the stolen phone recovery cell of GRP.
"Expensive phones can be sold in the black market and their IMEI number changed before resale in other states. Sometimes, spare parts are dismantled for use in other phones. If this is not done, police can track the phone once it’s switched on, even if another SIM card is inserted" he further added.
When contacted Mr Quaiser Khalid, Commissioner of government railway police of Mumbai, he said, "For the recovery of stolen phone from the other states of country we formed a special team. The team recovered over 50 stolen phones in the recent past, we are trying our best to handover all these phones to the rightful owners within a week"
