Don’t think it can’t happen. There you are minding your own business writing a sonnet, doing one-armed push-ups or translating the national anthem into Urdu.

At the back of your mind, the whole time, is the question of whether FM radio is in any way responsible for the voices in your head. All perfectly normal behaviour.

Yet, bam, in barge the police without so much as a by your leave and arrest you on charges of buffalo theft. And that’s if you’re lucky. Cattle-poaching is a serious crime in some parts but it doesn’t hold a candle to kidnapping for ransom or aiding and abetting the Taliban. And that is precisely what you could be in for if multiple cellphone connections have been issued against your name without your consent. Indeed, just one fraudulent number may land you in prison in these matchless days of fear and loathing.

If someone of import can vouch for your basic decency and entrenched respect for the law, the hallmark of all Dawn readers and writers, you might be able to explain how a call from ‘your’ cellphone did not set off a remote-controlled bomb.

Or how it wasn’t you who called saying that the kid would be shot if the ransom wasn’t paid.

Not everybody is that fortunate. The underprivileged in this country are presumed guilty from the outset and are usually not in a position to hire anyone competent enough to prove their innocence. Justice in Pakistan works along class lines and if you don’t have clout you could rot in prison — without trial — for a decade or more for someone else’s crime.

All this is a roundabout way of getting to the gist. If you haven’t done so already, type in your computerised national identity card number on your cellphone’s message screen and send it to 668. Within seconds you should get a response that lists all the connections issued against your CNIC.

I’m just one person out of tens of thousands across the country who have been informed that they are the owners of multiple SIMs that were never sought. Until Thursday morning I had 11 connections against my name. Only one SIM in that lot was legitimate, a Telenor account.

In keeping with our finer traditions, it is the victims who must clear their name. The process itself is simple: go to the cellphone companies with whom you have inexplicable accounts with an original CNIC as well as a photocopy, sign the indemnity form and put a thumb impression in the right place. And don’t forget to get a stamped copy of your affidavit for the record. Easy, right?

Not quite. Keep in mind that in cities like Karachi there could be up to 300 panicking people ahead of you in line. A word from the wise: get there at 8.45 (offices open at nine). If you arrive at 11, you could well be there until late in the afternoon.

I asked an officer at Mobilink how this fraud could be perpetrated. He did not deny that some franchisees could be deliberately selling SIMs against other people’s IDs. ‘Many people in rural areas do not have computerised identity cards, so a shopkeeper in a village issues a SIM under some other person’s name. CNIC details are easily available in a country where government offices and even private businesses ask you for a copy of your ID card for routine requests.’

And this, mind you, as you are handing over yet another copy of your identity card.

But that’s not the core problem, according to sources in Mobilink. In a large city, they said, thousands of SIM applications are processed en masse on any given day. A data-feeder may get one digit wrong in the CNIC and somebody else’s connection may come to be registered against your name. This explains, they claimed, how some people who do have a cellphone in their name are told by 668 that they are not in the database. Zero SIMs when they may well have three. Go figure.

An official at Warid disagreed, arguing that fraudulent accounts are activated deliberately by unscrupulous franchisees. ‘We have been asking customers that they should approach the company directly. The name and CNIC number must match, so a typing error is just an excuse.’ Maybe, who knows.

Where does it go from here? Armed with the affidavit, you are theoretically protected against criminal activity traced to numbers that aren’t yours. The cellphone companies in question claim your slate will be wiped clean almost instantly, that your name will no longer be associated with the disowned numbers (which you never get to know, by the way).

Then the people who have SIMs against your CNIC will be asked to come forward and have those accounts transferred to their own names, failing which their numbers will be blocked. That process could take more than a month.

At no stage, however, will anybody be hauled up. That’s the impression I got anyway. Tracking down the errant franchisees is not possible, I was told at every turn. Why not? Don’t you have a record of who sold what? Surely this can be traced in the age of, how do you put it, computers?

All I got was blank stares and bad vibes that left me convinced that the whole story will never be told. But then, as Hunter Thompson said, some things are never fully explained.

{Source: Dawn}