KEDA agrees to cooperate with Police on stopping trading of stolen mobile phones

The Dawn reports that the Karachi Electronic Dealers Association (KEDA) has agreed to cooperate with the police in controlling the trading of stolen mobile phones. According to the article, the chief of police Karachi says that 80 percent of trading of all stolen mobile takes place in Karachi’s Saddar electronic market, which the KEDA represents. This partnership is a positive move by the KEDA after April’s violent encounter with the local police that ended with KEDA’s top leadership being taken into overnight custody.

Mobile phone snatching incidents are getting more frequent and violent in Karachi. The Police and KEDA’s joint initiative, the m:track mobile tracking system has not had much of an impact on the crime rate, maybe because it relies on the mobile phone seller’s voluntary participation into the program.

Can technology be used to eliminate this dangerous trend without having to rely on the local police’s brute force or the local mobile sellers’ honesty?

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3 Responses to “KEDA agrees to cooperate with Police on stopping trading of stolen mobile phones”

  1. haq says:

    where are the local mobile carriers?Why aren’t the mobile carriers (Mobilink, Telenor etc) jumping on this oppertunity to protect their customers? It could be added as another service/benefit they offer. The can have the caller call their carrier and ask them to disable the phone on their network (each phone has a unique id which can be used to identify it). This will ofcourse happen once the caller has properly identifed themselves. Though, to make it work properly it would need to be an industry wide push.

  2. chowkidar says:

    RE: where are the local mobile carriers?That’s an interesting proposition and I don’t think it’s implemented anywhere else in the world either. Now that you bring it up… I too am wondering why?

    One guess is because of the management headaches. There would have to be a global blacklist implemented by all cellular networks. Another reason might be the overhead of identifying the caller’s cellphone and comparing it against the blacklist database (which would continue to grow over time and could become quite huge).

  3. BigSexyWashboardAbsAl says:

    The AnswerBig sexy has got the answer for you.
    Apparnetly reporting your phone as stolen and giving your IMEI involves getting an FIR made, and this whole Q&A thing as well as a hefty fine! People just dont want to be tormented by this B.S at the end of the day, so yes, yet again Pakistani’s took a good idea and found a way to make it a pain in the ass!

    But still if anyone is interested, you can get your IMEI number by dialing *#06# and if you phone is stolen, report this number to your carrier!

    Big Sexy’s Got Cha Numba!