The acting Director in Charge of Legal Affairs at the National Communications Authority Dr. Poku Adusei has explained that the re-registration of Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards is to help reduce and fight crime in the country.
In an interview on Happy FM’s ‘Epa Hoa Daben’, he explained that some vendors of the SIM cards bought the cards in bulk, pre-registered them with a single Identification Card (ID) and sold them. This caused a repetition of multiple names in the system making it difficult to track criminals.
Such SIM cards have over the years been used to commit various crimes including mobile money fraud, illegal SIM swap, and termination of international traffic (SIM-Boxing) leading to loss of revenue to the state, impersonation and Cyber-crime.
He informed Kwame Afrifa that it will be difficult to delete duplicated names from the registry because of our culture and naming in Ghana.
“It is not unusual to have multiple Ghanaians with the same name but with the re-registration, the unique numbers and identifiers carried on national identification cards will help make identification more effective and efficient.”
He explained that, the previous registration did not work because rules were not enforced. However, collaborating with the telecommunication companies and other stakeholders this time around will prevent lapses in the process.
He added that, with the advancement of technology it will be difficult to fight crime especially cybercrime if the re-registration process is not done.
All mobile SIM cards in the country will from January next year have to be re-registered in a new move by government to clean the current registration system, which has been characterized by fraud.
By: Joel Sanco
