By Our Special Correspondent
Guwahati(Assam), April 20: The CBI tore into India’s cybercrime supply chain before sunrise Saturday, pulling a Guwahati man it calls the “SIM quartermaster” out of hiding. Officials say he kept 10,000 illegal phone lines flowing to scam gangs nationwide.
Ubaid Ullah was cornered in the city on April 19 after vanishing in August 2025. Investigators allege he sat at the heart of a racket that turned corner-shop POS agents into SIM factories. No IDs, no questions — just cards, thousands of them, boxed and couriered to fraud crews running “digital arrest” threats, loan cons, and fake stock pitches that emptied bank accounts from Delhi to Dibrugarh.
The money trail is stark. Roughly Rs 67 lakh moved from Ullah’s orbit into POS agents’ hands, the CBI said, with each payment unlocking another stack of untraceable numbers. On the street, those SIMs were oxygen for scammers. Kill the number, kill the trail.
This is Operation Chakra-V: stop chasing only the voices on the phone, start dismantling the warehouses behind them. Forty-five sites across eight states have already been hit. Ten POS agents are in custody. Ullah, the agency believes, was the aggregator who kept the pipeline primed.
A senior official put it bluntly: “You don’t rob a bank with a face. You rob it with a SIM.” The CBI says more arrests will follow as it maps who printed, who paid, and who profited.
For now, one tap feeding India’s scam machine has gone dry in Guwahati.
