Pakistan’s campaign to verify the SIM cards of all mobile subscribers has sharply reduced serious crimes in Karachi, the police commissioner of the capital said during Telenor’s IoT Expo.

The biometric verification campaign, which started at the beginning of the year and was completed in April, has significantly reduced crime rates because criminals haven’t been able to communicate anonymously to ask for ransom or extortion money, ProPakistani reported.

Just over 71 million SIMs were verified and 25.9 million were blocked.

“Thanks to biometric verification of SIMs, the ransom rate has dropped to zero, while extortion cases have also gone down to almost zero,” commissioner Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui said at the event in Karachi.

However, it’s difficult to determine how much the SIM verification plan actually impacted the crime rate, because the government also carried out an anti-crime initiative in Karachi around the same time under its National Action Plan, the newspaper said.