Criminals continue to hide behind cell phones

Drug dealers are the main culprits hiding behind cell phones Keystone

Police in Zurich say criminals can still make calls anonymously from prepaid mobile phones because the Swiss registration system for SIM cards does not work properly.

By the end of 2006, officers had come across 17,000 cases of false registration during the course of their investigations.

“We very often come up against cases in which the user of a mobile phone is not the same as the person who registered it,” commented Susann Birrer, head of communications for Zurich’s city police.

She said numbers were still being registered under false names or a false business address, or even registered to a person who knew nothing about it.

Drug dealers were the main culprits, Birrer noted, adding that they were profiting from the knowledge that telephone tappers would not be able to identify exactly who was calling whom.

The issue of mobile phone registration came to the fore in Switzerland after revelations that members of the al-Qaeda terrorist cell involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States had been using Swiss prepaid phones, thereby guarding their anonymity.

Obligatory registration

Switzerland took action in 2004, introducing the obligatory registration of personal details as part of the fight against terrorism and crime. However, there is no central database.

“Lawmakers wanted to prevent [phone] numbers being used anonymously but this evidently does not work very well,” Birrer said.

However, she added that not all of the 17,000 false registrations were the work of criminals.

Birrer also pointed the finger at the behaviour of some political activists who were not being very helpful.

“They buy many [SIM] cards and then pass them on to others, for example to people who don’t have identity papers and cannot buy prepaid cards from shops,” she said.

Criminal intent

The cities of Bern and Basel tell a similar story. Markus Melzl, spokesman for Basel’s prosecuting authorities, said those with criminal intent could lay their hands on a falsely registered cell phone without any problem.

The law demands registration with an official identity paper but it is not forbidden to pass the number on once this has been done. But the first-time buyer remains liable – theoretically.

Police say many people claim that they do not know who possesses their old number or that they have lost their phone.

Thomas Jauch, spokesman for Bern’s city police, said numbers were also passed on several times. “Then you lose the thread completely,” he said.

Telephone providers block numbers that are falsely registered but it can take months before errors come to light.

Police in Zurich are trying to improve the situation through talks with the country’s communication authorities and telephone providers but there have so far been no concrete results.

There are also no plans for stricter legal regulations.

swissinfo with agencies

Key facts

There are about three million prepaid SIM cards active in Switzerland.
According to the Federal Statistics Office, there were about 6.9 million mobile telephone users at the end of 2005.
The figure is thought to have risen to more than seven million.

SIM Card

A SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) is a removable smart card for mobile phones.

SIM cards securely store the service-subscriber key to identify a mobile phone.

It holds personal identity information, cell phone number, phone book, text messages and other data.

It allows users to change phones by simply removing the SIM card from one mobile phone and inserting it into another.