For more than a decade, Bangladesh’s mobile phone ecosystem has been quietly overtaken by counterfeit and cloned devices, operating inside the country’s networks with little resistance and almost no scrutiny.
The full scale of the crisis only became clear after the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission activated the National Equipment Identity Register, or NEIR. What the system uncovered was staggering: millions of active phones sharing duplicate International Mobile Equipment Identity numbers, the unique digital fingerprint meant to distinguish one handset from another.
In one case, a single IMEI was linked to nearly two million active devices. Another placeholder number, “999999999999999,” appeared on almost 40 million connections over the past ten years. Such duplication is technically impossible without deliberate, large-scale manipulation.
This was not random fraud. It was an ecosystem.
A Crisis Even the Government Did Not Anticipate
The severity of the findings has prompted rare public alarm from within the government itself. Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb, Special Assistant to the Chief Adviser in charge of the ICT Division, acknowledged that authorities had long suspected the presence of cloned and counterfeit phones, but had grossly underestimated the scale.
In a series of social media posts, he wrote that selling counterfeit phones to Bangladeshi citizens under the label of “unofficial new” devices amounted to an “unimaginable and unprecedented deception.” He warned that the network behind this trade must be brought under control urgently.
His admission underscores a central reality: the problem was not hidden. It was simply tolerated.
How the Grey Market Took Over
Every legitimate mobile phone is assigned a unique IMEI at the factory, embedded in its hardware. In Bangladesh, however, millions of phones entered the market with duplicated, recycled, or fabricated IMEIs.
Using specialized flashing tools, illegal assemblers overwrite the original identifiers and stamp thousands of devices with the same number. To evade detection, cloners either copy IMEIs from legitimate phones already active on the network or use placeholder sequences such as strings of zeroes or nines. In the absence of real-time validation, these devices connect without resistance.
Once inside the system, the damage multiplies. Blocking one phone does little when hundreds of others share the same identity. Network logs become unreliable. Tracking stolen devices becomes nearly impossible. Criminal attribution collapses.
NEIR data shows that just ten IMEIs account for roughly five million active phones, a concentration that points unmistakably to organized, industrial-scale operations.
Major brands reflect the same distortion. Of nearly two million iPhones currently active in Bangladesh, only a small fraction were legally imported. Samsung devices show an even wider gap, with more than 14 million bypassing official channels.
Consumers were often unaware. Phones were sold boxed, branded, and marketed as new, priced just low enough to undercut official retailers.
Regulators Trapped by Their Own Inaction
Bangladesh’s smartphone tax regime has long been cited as a driver of the grey market. Combined import duties range from 35 to 60 percent, creating strong incentives to evade customs entirely.
But high taxes alone do not explain why cloned phones were allowed to function for years.
Placeholder IMEIs were never blacklisted. Mobile operators failed to flag mass duplication. Internet-of-Things devices were not properly separated from consumer handsets, further inflating duplication. Responsibility was fragmented across regulators, operators, customs authorities, and law enforcement, ensuring that no single institution was clearly accountable.
When NEIR finally went live, enforcement posed an immediate dilemma. Shutting down all illegal devices would disconnect millions of users overnight. Regulators chose caution.
Instead of blocking them, NEIR classified these handsets as “grey” devices: officially illegitimate, but still allowed to operate.
Critics argue this approach merely formalizes illegality and rewards years of noncompliance. Authorities counter that sudden enforcement would punish ordinary citizens rather than the networks that enabled the abuse.
Crime Built on Cloned Devices
The consequences extend far beyond consumer deception.
According to Bangladesh Bank data, nearly three-quarters of digital fraud cases in 2024 involved unregistered or cloned devices. In 2023, 85 percent of e-KYC fraud relied on phones that could not be traced to legitimate identities.
Cloned phones provide criminals with anonymity, scale, and disposability. When a device is blocked, another identical IMEI appears instantly on the network. This makes fraud detection, financial tracing, and prosecution significantly harder.
That same year, more than 180,000 mobile phone thefts were recorded across the country, the vast majority never solved. Without reliable device identification, recovery becomes largely symbolic.
In effect, cloned phones have become infrastructure for financial crime.
When Identity Itself Is Compromised
For ordinary citizens, the crisis has taken on a deeply personal dimension.
Faizullah Noman, a resident of Motijheel in Dhaka, told this reporter that after the government introduced a new verification system, he checked his own national identity number out of curiosity. What he found was alarming.
Sixty-three mobile phones were registered under his National ID.
“In my entire 29-year life, I have never used that many phones,” he said. “My information has been cloned and used illegally to register these devices. This was not done by ordinary people. It was done by an organized criminal network. Now the question is, who takes responsibility for this, and how safe am I?”
His experience is not isolated. Social media platforms, particularly Facebook, are now flooded with similar accounts from users discovering unknown phones and SIMs registered under their identities.
The implications are severe. When state-issued identification can be weaponized at this scale, digital security ceases to be a technical issue and becomes a crisis of governance.
A Decade of Structural Failure
What NEIR has exposed is not a sudden breakdown, but the cumulative effect of years of neglect.
Illegal practices became routine. Consumers adapted. Retailers normalized deception. Criminal networks expanded fastest of all.
By the time the system was audited, the scale of contamination was so vast that enforcement itself became politically and socially risky.
What Is at Stake
Bangladesh now faces a narrow set of options, none of them painless.
Gradual enforcement risks entrenching illegality permanently. Aggressive shutdowns risk public backlash and economic disruption. Tax reform could shrink the grey market, but only if paired with strict IMEI enforcement and accountability for operators and importers who enabled the abuse.
Millions of citizens are using phones that never passed safety or radiation tests. Billions in tax revenue have been lost. And the country’s digital infrastructure has been quietly reshaped around devices designed to be untraceable.
NEIR has made the problem visible. Whether authorities dismantle the cloning economy or merely manage it will determine not just the future of Bangladesh’s telecom sector, but the credibility of its digital state.
+ There are no comments
Add yours