Citizens who had already given up hope of getting their lost/stolen mobile phones, were pleasantly surprised when they got the call from the Navghar police station to come and take back their handsets. The Navghar police had successfully recovered 51 mobile phones collectively worth more than Rs.15 lakh which were either lost-in-transit or stolen.
The handsets were handed over to their rightful owners in the presence of DCP (Zone I) Prakash Gaikwad on Saturday. Alarmed by the rise in the number of complaints related to lost phones, senior police inspector-Dhiraj Koli deputed a special team to investigate the cases.
The team collected data on stolen/missing mobile phones by using the central equipment identity register (CEIR) portal and traced the locations of handsets on the virtue of international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) numbers, supported by electronic surveillance.
The portal proved to be a crucial asset in tracing such devices across pan-India telecom networks. The CEIR is a citizen-centric portal launched by the central government under the aegis of the department of telecommunications (DOT) to curtail the counterfeit mobile phone market, discourage mobile phone theft, and misuse and for tracing lost/stolen mobile devices.
