First Conviction in Prepaid Mobile Phone Trafficking!

The practice of illegal handset trafficking has long been a thorn in most Prepaid cellular phone companies side but as of yesterday Virgin Mobile managed to get the first conviction of an individual involved in this type of practice. Muhammad Mubashir of Texas was convicted in the Texas courts of being in criminal contempt for attempting to export mobile phones to China in violation of an injunction entered against him by the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Texas in a civil case brought by Virgin Mobile USA. L.L.C.

The handsets, which are usually sold at a loss in order to acquire customers, are bought by the traffickers and then not used with the service but shipped overseas to be sold as a low cost mobile phone to be used with the local carriers. As a result prepaid mobile companies like Virgin Mobile and TracFone, expecting to generate the minute revenue to make up for the hardware loss, have experienced poor huge financial losses instead.

On May 9 last year, an Immigration and Customs agent and a Border Protection officer examined a shipment at Eagle Global Logistics being exported by a company owned by Mubashir, Americas Wireless, to Yeng Fung Trading Company in Hong Kong. The shipment contained 46 Virgin Mobile cellphones, all made by Nokia (model 2115i), that displayed the Virgin Mobile name and logo. An injunction was issued to prevent him from continuing the process but he choose to disobey that injunction and kept up the practice which resulted in his conviction on contempt charges.

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