By Chinenye Anuforo [email protected]
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) is planning a fresh onslaught against criminals using mobile lines/SIM for fraud.
The move feeds into the regulator’s bid to provide a safe and secure ICT ecosystem, considering that fraudsters’ nefarious activities have severe consequences on the economy.
To achieve the objective, the NCC said it plans to develop a regulation that will make it a criminal offence for anyone to use mobile lines/SIM for fraud.
According to the Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the commission, Aminu Maida, who disclosed this in Lagos during a recent interactive session with journalists, revealed that the regulation, as it stands today, does not provide any consequence for using mobile lines for fraud, which is why many people have continued to perpetrate criminalities with SIMs unchecked.
He said the regulation that will come up later this year would ensure that fraudsters using mobile lines for fraud face consequences.
He expressed concerns over people using other people’s lines/SIM to commit fraud through recycling. To address this, he said Nigerian banks would also need to continuously revalidate the ownership of numbers attached to bank accounts as telecom operators are bound to recycle and resell mobile lines not used for a certain period.
He said: “We want to protect the integrity of our mobile numbers. When we don’t use it for a while, it has to be recycled and this exposes people to fraud. We want to create more awareness about this so that people can understand that there is a window during
which if they do not use their line, it can be allocated to another person.
“People are using mobile numbers for a lot of frauds today and this is because there is no consequence. We are coming up with a regulation that will make sure there is a
consequence for using your mobile for fraud.”
On the issue of vendors selling already registered SIM, the NCC Director of Compliance, Mr Efosa Idehen, explained that this has been a contentious issue in the industry because the regulator has been working on some new ways to get these vendors comply to what is supposed to be.
“We have done so many things like controlled environment. There are places that you are not supposed to even buy SIM but Nigerians go there to buy from them. We are going to work from the back end because for every device that registers a SIM card, we
know the device and we know the person whose signature was on that device on the day it was registered. So we are going to follow through to find a way of picking up such people and bringing them before the law especially now NIN-SIM linkage is compulsory
and it is an offence for you to generate wrong NIN to register your SIM card. As at now, what we have done to combat this, was to give a directive to all the operators to check their system to ensure that every SIM cards that has not linked to their NIN to be removed. We have given a long time for everybody to go to their service provider to correct whatever it is that is wrong with their SIMs.
For instance, NIN of some people have been duplicated unknown to them, so it is when we do this type of exercise that we see them reclaiming back their SIMs as the original owner.
“We have a lot of things people do within the industry that is just for financial gain because sometimes, the person registering you, are not the staff of the operators, so they do a lot of things and we are seeing them from the back end and we want to correct all that so that when you say you are the owner of a SIM we know that it is truly yours.”