Communications Minister Haruna Iddrisu says the existence of fraud associated with the illegal termination of international call traffic locally exposes lapses in the SIM registration exercise. He said the ability of SIM box fraudsters to procure SIM cards of the various networks en masse means subscribers are using false details to register their SIM cards. His comments follow last weekend’s arrest of an American National and seven Ghanaians by National Security for illegally terminating foreign calls. In their possession were several mobile phone chips belonging to various telecom networks. This, the Minister believes is inappropriate. He said telecoms regulator the National Communications Authority (NCA) must sit up. He said the SIM registration exercise must be monitored to “ensure that impersonators do not succeed and do not get away.” The government, the minister said, “remains committed to eliminating anonymous fraud and anonymous fraud associated with the use of telephony particularly mobile telephony and this can only be done if we know who owns a particular chip, who owns a particular number through a diligent SIM registration exercise.” The NCA has requested all telecom operators in the country to register Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) cards sold out to customers. What kind of monitoring is carried out by the sector regulator to ensure the registration exercise is not flawed? Paa Rock Van Percy, the Director General of the NCA was asked. He said a team was being set up to verify the registration process to eliminate fraud. “We expect that in the coming months we should be able to in a regime that will begin to sanitise the process,” he said. Source: Joy News/Ghana