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Abdulrazaq Mungadi, Gombe
Nigeria Telecommunications Commission (NCC) has vowed to prosecute any Service provider, SIM registration agent as well as subscribers found selling and using pre-registered SIM cards in the country. This was revealed by the Deputy Manager, commission’s Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement department, Mr. Salisu, represented by Efosa Idehen.
He made the disclosure while speaking to journalists during a one-day Regional Sensitisation Workshop on “Dangers of Dealing on Fraudulently Activated SIM cards, on Tuesday in Gombe.
He said the objective of the subscriber registration was basically to assist in easy identification of mobile telephone users, he, however, added that some agents of mobile network operators produced fully registered and activated SIM cards with fraudulent details and sale same to customers;
“Hence the act has made it difficult to investigate crimes being committed through the use of such SIM cards”.
Lamenting the pace of the mandatory Subscriber Registration Mr. Sunday Dare
NCC Executive Commissioner Stakeholder Management who was represented by his special assistant Babatunde Akpeji said the journey has not been as smooth as it should be after eight years; “given the very comprehensive efforts that went into the design of the process”.
He said, “It is painful to note that we still have cases of sale of pre-registered SIMs, cases of breach of SIM registration processes, fraudulent registrations and other breaches”.
According to him “to address the concerns, NCC has had several meetings and sensitization workshops with the different stakeholder groups across the industry and also a direction mandating that any registered and activated MSISDN with no Revenue Generating Event (RGE) within 48 hours should automatically be returned to one way activation, that is receive only”.
