Four held for robbing SIM deliverymen

MUMBAI: A former BPO employee and three of his friends were arrested by the Malwani police for robbing half a dozen agents of various cellphone service providers. The group would call up leading service providers asking for new connections and then loot the agents who cam to deliver the SIM cards.
As most of their victims shied away from lodging a police complaint, the gang managed to escape detection.
The accused, Kadam Sayyad, Shah Rukh Shaikh, Adnan Shandar and Nadeem Shaikh, are all aged between 19 and 21 years of age. Of these,
Adnan used to be employed with a BPO and spoke fluent English. He lost his job a fortnight ago.
The four youths are residents of Azmi Nagar in Malwani.
The robberies came to light when one of the gang's victims, Akash Singh (19), lodged an FIR on Tuesday. "The accused would first call up a popular telephonic search engine to obtain numbers of cellphone service providers. They would then place orders for three to four Sim cards. The service provider would offer to send an agent to their homes for paperwork, at which the accused would provide the address of a deserted location in Malwani," investigating officer Arun Pokharkar said.
Once the agent arrived, the gang members would bash him up and rob whatever valuables they could find on him. As the agents were mostly clueless about the topography of Malwani, they were never able to trace the accused again. "The gang called over at least four agents on the same day, but at different timings, and robbed them of their watches, phones and money. Based on the descriptions provided by Singh, we traced one of the accused. He then led us to his associates.
So far, the gang has robbed valuables worth Rs 36,460, of which cops have managed to recover valuables worth Rs 8,500.
The accused were produced before a local court on Wednesday. The police has managed to trace four out of six agents robbed by the gang.