The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunication, Kwaku Sakyi Addo has reiterated that telecommunication companies in the country are not complicit in the recurring SIM box fraud.
[contextly_sidebar id=”otmbLCYAGh6LkJxThyFZVoHjkdu3rCwU”]His comment follows the arrest of the former Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Real Estates Developers Association (GREDA), Dr. Alexander Tweneboah and six others who were allegedly involved in the activity.
The arrest was jointly made by the National Communications Authority (NCA), and the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service.
The Director General of the CID, COP Prosper Ablorh lamented that the nation has lost more than one hundred million Ghana cedis as a result of the practice adding that about 21,232 SIM cards were recovered from one of the operators.
According to Kwaku Sakyi Addo, the telecommunication companies should not be blamed for the issue because they cannot authenticate the validity of identity cards submitted by customers when registering sim cards.
He said the issue is a national problem saying, “I can say on behalf of my members that no network operator is actively participating in this illegal business.”
“When people buy sim cards and when they submit ID cards the vendor of the sim card or network operative agent cannot determine the validity or otherwise of the ID card that the individual is presenting.They don’t have anyway of verifying whether or not the ID card is an authentic one from the issuing authority. ” he said.
He added that “the problem is beyond the network operator.”
“And so the problem that we are seeing with regards to identification is a manifestation of a deeper problem and until we solve that it is not peculiar to a network operator.”
Kwaku Sakyi Addo further blamed the issue on the pricing of telecommunication services saying “we believe the problem is a pricing problem and if we remove the incentive that makes sim boxing attractive then we would have unearthed the root cause of the problem. And if we do not unearth and eliminate this incentive problem, ten years from now it [SIM box fraud] will still continue.”
He however called for a stiff punishment for anyone found indulging in such “illegal activity.”
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By: Godwin Allotey Akweiteh/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @AlloteyGodwin