All Answers: Re: [pakgrid] Monitoring of Suspicious Mobile Phone SIMs

Saturday, 17 November 2012

Re: [pakgrid] Monitoring of Suspicious Mobile Phone SIMs

Agreed.... Academic and industry should come up together for this cause.

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 10:34 PM, Sajjad Haider <shaider@gmualumni.org> wrote:

Dear All,

I wrote the following piece as a "Letter to Editor" but I am not sure if this would ever get published. Nevertheless, considering the interests and affiliation of the members of this group, this is probably the most relevant forum for discussion on this theme.

Best regards,
Sajjad
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Dr. Sajjad Haider
IBA, Karachi

Monitoring of Suspicious Mobile Phone SIMs

In the past couple of months, the government has resorted to an extreme measure of blocking mobile phone SIMs to thwart potential terrorist attacks. Despite the fact that the government must be praised for taking a preemptive measure in public's interest, no matter how naive it may sound, this cannot be a long term and permanent solution. Instead, what we need is an analytical framework that aids competent authorities in identifying suspicious use of mobile phone SIMs. It is worth mentioning that illegal SIMs are not only used by terrorists for suicide or remote-controlled bombings; they are also used by extortionist and kidnappers to run their illegal activities.

Artificial intelligence (AI) based techniques can help in identifying mobile phone SIMs that are being used for illegal activities. We already have precedence in the form of Anti-Money Laundering Act that requires banks to report suspicious activities to a Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU) that may initiate further investigation against the beneficiary or executor of a suspicious transaction. To comply with the Act, all banks have deployed artificial intelligence and statistical reasoning based tools that help in the identification of suspicious patterns. In a similar spirit, automated tools that can identify suspicious usage patterns of mobile phone SIMs need to be deployed by mobile network operators and their findings should be reported to Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), Interior Ministry or any other competent government body.

It is worth mentioning that AI techniques have been used throughout the world by the telecommunication industry to develop churn models that help mobile network operators to predict customer attrition. One can deploy similar AI techniques to predict if a particular mobile phone SIM is being used in a suspicious way. It can also be argued that learning from the experience of banking sector in tackling suspicious activities would also be very useful in developing the proposed analytical framework. Implementing rules that are similar to the existing banking procedures can result in the deactivation of many unwanted mobile phone SIMs. For instance, if a person does not use his bank account for 6 months then the account becomes dormant. In a similar way, a (prepaid) mobile phone SIM not being used for few months should be deactivated and a personal visit should be the only mechanism for its activation.

There is no doubt that a successful implementation of such analytical framework would require research and development efforts by both academic and industry but it is the only long term viable solution to the volatile law & order situation in which we are living.