Govt Will Track Your Lost Or Stolen Mobile Phone: All You Need To Do Is Call This Number Or Visit This Govt. Website

Are you among the ones who’ve lost your mobile phones, or have been robbed off? Even if you aren’t, we are sure you must know someone who has. Well, we have news for you. The Central government have come to our rescue.

The Minister of Telecommunications, Ravi Shankar Prasad unveiled  a portal in Mumbai on Friday that shall help mobile phone users trace their stolen or lost mobile phones. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has undertaken a project called ‘Central Equipment Identity Register’ (CEIR) for the said purpose.

The project has started on a pilot basis in Maharashtra on Friday and later it will be implemented across the country.

So let’s see how these propositions will help us. This article right here shall get a teed bit technical but we’ll help you traverse through it almost easily.

DoT Will Now Trace your Lost Mobile Phones

The Department of Telecommunications has come up with a project called Central Equipment Identity Register for the purpose of blocking the lost or stolen mobile phones across mobile networks, discouraging their theft and tracing these devices.

All mobile phones have a unique International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number that helps in identifying them. Now, as IMEI can be reprogrammed, the dupants reprogram these numbers and many a time, there exists 2 devices with the same IMEI number.

Today, there’re a lot of duplicated IMEI handsets. The worst part is, these numbers cnnot be blocked because then many innocent customers will suffer.

Due to this very reason, DoT has come up with the CEIR website, in par with addressing security and theft. In fact, DoT has listed these as the primary objectives of CEIR:

• Blocking lost or stolen  mobile phones across mobile networks thus discouraging theft of such phones,
• facilitate in tracing of such reported lost or stolen phones,
•  prevention of mobile devices with duplicate and fake IMEIs in the network,
•  curtail the use of counterfeit mobile devices,
•  reduced health risks to the users with the control of use of counterfeit mobile phones
• Improved QoS and reduced call drops with reduction in use of counterfeit mobile devices.

How Can you File a Complaint?

In events of your phone getting lost or stolen, you’ll have to undergo these steps:

• Lodge an FIR with the police and inform the Department of Telecom about the incident through the helpline number 14422 or visit this website.
• Once the verification is completed, DoT will blacklist the phone, blocking it from further use.
• Along with this, if anyone tries to use the device using a different SIM, the service provider will identify the new user and inform the police.
• The police will then trace the lost or stolen mobile phone.
• All the major service providers BSNL, Reliance Jio, Airtel, Vodafone, Idea will help the DoT to track the phone.

DoT has been working on this CEIR project since 2017. It has generated a database of IMEI numbers in India since then. It will also have access to GSM Association’s (GSMA) worldwide database of IMEI numbers to compare and detect mobile phone with counterfeit IMEI numbers.