Kathmandu, September 22

On an average, 50 to 60 persons queue up outside a makeshift tent set up on the premises of Metropolitan Police Range, Teku, to register complaints regarding stolen or lost mobile phones.

The MPR, Teku, has deployed three police personnel to record complaints regarding missing or stolen mobile phones.

But inside the make-shift tent there is only one computer. Today alone at least 90 people visited MPR, Teku, to file complaints regarding lost or stolen mobile phones.

Apart from those 90 persons, there were 30 to 40 more people who had visited the police range after a month of registering the complaints with the hope of getting their mobile phones back. According to the data with police, of the total complaints regarding lost/stolen mobile phones, only 10 percent mobile phones are traced by police, on an average.

To file a complaint, one has to produce the IMEI number of the missing mobile phone.

After a complaint is registered, police ask complainants to visit Metropolitan Police Range, Teku after a month. But in most cases people do not get any information about their missing mobile phones.

As many as 2,882 complaints were registered in the first two months of the current fiscal. Of them police successfully traced 342 mobile phones.

The success rate was slightly higher in fiscal 2018-19  with 2,199 mobile phones retrieved successfully.

A total of 16,019 complaints were registered in fiscal 2018-19. In fiscal 2017-18, less than 10 per cent of such mobile phones were  retrieved.

Of the 15,787 lost or stolen mobile phones, police had retrieved total 1,518 mobile phones.

Radhika Basnet, a college student from Kausaltar who was at the MPR, Teku, today said she filed a  case suspecting her mobile phone was stolen from a public vehicle a month ago, but today police returned her empty handed.

Senior Superintendent of Police Uttam Raj Subedi, who heads Metropolitan Police Range, Teku, said recovering lost mobiles was a huge challenge.

“Chances of tracing a lost mobile phone are slim if the person who finds the mobile phone removes its SIM card. We can locate lost mobile phones if the people who found it used the same SIM or other SIM cards, but people have become very smart. They don’t use any new SIM card in those mobile phones, and use them on WiFi,” SSP Subedi said.

SSP Subedi said although it was easy to trace the location of mobile phones, police had to go through legal procedures causing delay in retrieving them.

“First we need to get permission from the court to trace missing cell phones on the basis their IMEI numbers, as avoiding the procedure would violate people’s right to privacy. The court takes up to 30 days to grant permission,” said a police personnal

deployed to record complaints, adding that after getting permission from the court, they had to request service providers like Nepal Telecom and Ncell to trace the location of the missing mobile phones.

Multiple police sources said majority of stolen mobiles were sold in bordering towns of India. “We suspect that there are people involved in such rackets, but we have not been able to crack down on them yet,” said SSP Subedi.

He added, once the stolen mobile phones reach other countries, it is almost impossible to trace such phones.