China will require mobile phone buyers to register with the government starting in 2006. The move is an attempt to cut down crimes being perpetrated with anonymous phones.
Vice Minister of Information Industry Xi Guohua said earlier that according to statistics of the Ministry of Public Security, most crimes committed via mobile phones do not have real persons registered to these phones.
Pre-paid customers amount to a little more of half the 388 million mobile phones in China. It's unknown how many pre-paid customers do not have real name information for their account, but even a small fraction would mean a lot of people.
[via The Raw Feed]