#BreakingNews: Delhi Police Bust High-Tech IMEI Tampering Factory in Karol Bagh

Delhi Police have successfully dismantled a sophisticated clandestine mobile phone manufacturing and IMEI tampering facility hidden on the fourth floor of a nondescript commercial building in the bustling Beadonpura locality of Karol Bagh, delivering a major setback to organized cybercrime syndicates that rely on untraceable communication devices.

The breakthrough operation, codenamed Cyberhawk, culminated in a precision raid executed on November 20 after fifteen days of intensive surveillance and verified intelligence that pinpointed illegal assembly and reprogramming activities; authorities seized 1,826 fully or partially modified handsets, multiple laptops actively running prohibited IMEI-altering programs, specialized scanners, thousands of imported mobile casings, motherboards, batteries, and stacks of pre-printed counterfeit IMEI stickers.

During the raid, five accused—Ashok Kumar, Ramnarayan, Dharmendra Kumar, Deepanshu, and Deepak—were apprehended in the act of transplanting old, damaged, or stolen motherboards into brand-new Chinese-imported bodies and systematically rewriting their unique 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identity numbers using banned software suites such as WRITEIMEI 0.2.2 and WRITEIMEI 2.0, effectively erasing any digital trail linking the devices to their original owners or legitimate databases.

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Investigators established that the syndicate deliberately crafted “ghost phones” that do not appear in any global manufacturer registry, rendering them invisible to law-enforcement tracking systems and immensely valuable to perpetrators of online fraud, phone-based scams, terrorist communication, and other serious offenses who require disposable yet fully functional devices that cannot be monitored or blocked.

These counterfeit handsets were systematically channeled into Delhi-NCR’s notorious grey markets, including Karol Bagh and Gaffar Market, with the unit reportedly dispatching several hundred untraceable phones every month; authorities have now widened the probe to trace the complete supply chain—from Chinese spare-parts exporters to the final criminal end-users—who knowingly purchased these illicit devices to evade detection.

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