At paan cabins, wrappers give criminals someone to ‘chew’ on

Paper used at roadside stalls include copies of bank statements and tax returns.

KARACHI:

Expertly folding a betel leaf with various delicacies at one of the roadside kiosks in Saddar, Muhammad Ramzan wraps the paan in a small piece of paper in a cone-shaped package before handing it over to a customer.

The entire process takes about a minute only. It’s a routine followed millions of times every day, except that the wrapping paper changes every time; sometimes they are bank statements, sometimes tax return receipts or copies of telephone bills or passports.

“No one cares about the papers we use to wrap the paan,” said Ramzan smiling, showing off his decayed teeth. “I am only careful about religious scriptures.”

Pages with pictures of women from foreign magazines are always in demand, he added.

Of what could contain information about bank customers, high-net-worth individuals, businessmen and traders, one can buy these paper sheets for Rs20 a kilogramme. The paper comes along with betel nuts, leaves and cigarettes, which the traders buy from a congested street located off the famous Napier Road. Known as Patang Gali, there are dozens of shops lined on both sides dealing in scrap paper.

Stacks upon stacks of paper, including pages of newspapers and magazines such as The Sun and Reader’s Digest, are sold here. Among these stacks are documents containing confidential information.

Traders are reluctant to talk openly. Most of them just pass on the buck to others, saying they have no idea where all the junk comes from.

“We get the stuff from wholesalers, who in turn deal with the scrap dealers,” said a trader, Imran. “We have no concern with what is written on these pages.”

No such threat?

It is hard to say with certainty if such information has been picked up from the streets by criminals to blackmail individuals. But security experts say there is always a possibility.

“I can’t recall any case where extortionists might have put such documents to use,” says Ahmed Chinoy, the chief of the Citizen Police Liaison Committee (CPLC). “To be honest, our criminals are not so sophisticated. They rely on close contacts.”

This is indeed the case perhaps. A couple of weeks ago, suspected gangsters lobbed a hand grenade at the residence of a factory owner in DHA. The attack was followed by threatening phone calls and text messages.

“We are clueless as to how they got the number. But I suspect one of the factory workers must have passed it on,” a relative of the businessman had said.

As extortion and ransom threats rise, traders are spending more and more money on their protection and trying their best to remain discreet.

State of neglect

About the documents selling in the market, Chinoy suspects carelessness on part of the financial institutions and government departments. “They probably hand over the documents to the lower staff to be discarded. And who wouldn’t want to make some extra cash selling what looks like trash?”

Papers available with The Express Tribune date back to the period between 2002 and 2006. These include payment receipts for shipments transacted at a private bank, sales tax return documents processed at the Sales Tax Collectorate, someone’s phone bill and a copy of a cancelled passport.

Interviews with tax officials, bankers and lawyers suggest there are guidelines for keeping the customer information confidential and the period for how long they are to be stored. But there is no specific rule on the way they are discarded.

Irrelevant documents and customer information should be burned, according to tax laws. Multinational companies and large corporations use paper shredders, but their usage is not common elsewhere. While Nadra insisted it is extra careful in discarding records, the State Bank of Pakistan said that documents submitted by customers form an integral part of the bank’s record.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 4^th, 2012.