PCOs book 500 cr private call

PCOs have certainly revolutionized telecommunication and reachability, and have been cited as one of the best examples of social entreprenurism, but things are not so hunky-dory with the whole thing. PCO owners are typically given 20 to 35% of their revenue as commission, but these owners use the PCO for making their own private calls, which actually translates to losses of over 500 cr for BSNL. What could be a solution to verify whether a customer is genuine or not?

Smart card based dialing could be one option, where each call is tagged with the customer ID on the smart card and monitored centrally, or cryptographic mechanisms are used to increment sequence numbers on the smart card to support prepaid or postpaid billing. This would however require changes in all the PCO instruments. A more practical option could be a phone card based approach, where customers will have to dial in a secret ID as a pincode before making a call, and the ID would get tagged on to the call for centralized monitoring and even billing.