Asish Mehta
Post News Network
Bhubaneswar, Dec 18: Mobile phone owners of the city are an unhappy lot. Complaints of missing mobile phones are flooding the police stations across the city of late with at least four being registered every day, according to police sources.
However, little is done to help the hapless user retrieve the valuable
information that was stored on the handsets.
Abhilash Mohanty, a native of Hanspal, said that he had lost his smartphone in the Kharavel Nagar area and had approached the police. However, the police did not seem bothered in the least, he said.
“The police asked me to file an affidavit and a complaint of the missing mobile phone for security reasons. However, they did not tell me even once that they would try to retrieve it,” he said.
Mukesh Sahoo, a resident of Jaydev Vihar said that people who lose expensive handsets are obviously very depressed.
Lodging a complaint with the police and getting the phone back is quite an ordeal, according to Sahoo.
The police can retrieve the missing phones but put in effort only when there is a criminal aspect to the phone going missing, an official at Saheed Nagar police station admitted.
“Handsets are often tracked with the help of the device’s unique International Mobile Station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number,” he said.
“The police can track the handset using the IMEI because of the technological advancement, but we do it only when there is any criminal aspect involved,” he said.
Another police official at Khandagiri police station said that the mobile phones are lost only because of the negligence of the people. “Complaints of the lost mobile phones are registered in the police stations but we cannot retrieve all of them. The phones are lost because of the negligence of the users,” he said.
However, the additional deputy commissioner of police, Bhubaneswar, Brahmananda Dandapata, asserted that police are looking into the matter of missing mobile phones.
