The government anticipated the widespread use of “cloned and fake phones”, but it did not realise the severity would be “so deep”, Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb, special assistant to the chief adviser for Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, said yesterday (2 January).

“After the launch of NEIR, alarming information about clone phones has come to light,” Tayieb said in a Facebook post on 2 January.

He disclosed that hundreds of thousands of fake IMEI numbers are currently active in the network.

“Fake IMEI numbers such as ‘1111111111111’, ‘0000000000000’, ‘9999999999999’ and similar patterns exist in the network,” he said, adding that these phones have never undergone radiation tests, including Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) testing and other types of safety tests.

However, the government is not blocking these IMEI numbers at this stage, he further added.

“Millions of citizens are using these substandard fake phones. These phones are widely active and spread across the networks of the four mobile operators. The government will not take any step that creates inconvenience in public life. So these phones will not be shut down,” he said.

Taiyeb further clarified that the phones with these IMEI numbers will be tagged Grey instead.

One IMEI, many phones

In his Facebook post, Taiyeb mentioned that the fake IMEI numbers found in the network consist of thousands of “fake phones”.

“A list of top IMEI numbers shows that 1.95 million devices have the IMEI number 440015202000, which have been brought in as duplicates,” he said, adding that in the total count of the past 10 years, a single IMEI number 99999999999999 has been found 39,122,534 times in various combinations (Document ID + MSISDN +IMEI).

However, he also acknowledged that such IMEIs can also belong not just to smartphones, but also to different IoT devices.

“For example, CCTV or similar devices may have been brought under the same IMEI number. We have started the work of separately tagging IoT devices that have been legally imported,” Taiyeb said.

Taiyeb emphasised the urgency to put an end to fake and cloned phones.

“Selling fake phones to Bangladeshi citizens under the name of unofficial new phones is an unimaginable and unprecedented fraud,” he said.