A sessions court in Bhubaneswar on Wednesday convicted seven people, including five from Odisha, for purchasing SIM cards under fake identities and exchanging one-time passwords with ISI operatives.
The Sub-Divisional Judicial Magistrate (SDJM) Court in Bhubaneswar sentenced them to three years’ imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs. $32,000 on each of them.
The convicts are Pritam Kar and Soumya Ranjan Pattanaik of Jajpur. Pathani Samanta Lenka, Saroj Kumar Nayak and Pradyumina Sahoo from Nayagarh; Abhijeet Sanjay from Pune; Iqbal Hussain is from Guwahati.
The Special Task Force (STF) of Odisha Police arrested the seven accused in May 2023. During the investigation, the STF found links of the main accused Lenka with ISI operatives, following which the National Security Act (NSA) was activated against him.
The accused were in contact with Pakistani agents Danish Ali and Abdul Hamid. Odisha Police has sought assistance from the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) in connection with the case. Despite repeated attempts, Pakistani authorities have not shared any information related to the case with Odisha Police, the officers said.
The Special Task Force had arrested them on charges of fraudulently purchasing large numbers of pre-activated SIM cards in the names of other people and selling the OTPs to ISI and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents in Pakistan and India for large sums of money.
OTPs have been misused to open online banking accounts and create accounts on social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook and Instagram, as well as on online shopping websites.
