The National Communications Authority (NCA) has detected massive fraud in the registration of existing Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) cards in the country, barely two weeks to the end of the exercise. About 30 per cent of the SIM cards registered so far were registered with fake identity cards, making the registration invalid and subject to deactivation of the affected SIM cards on June 30, 2011, the deadline for the exercise. Meanwhile, available data from the NCA point to about 95 per cent of the approximately 17.6 million subscribers in the country having been registered. The Director-General of the NCA, Mr Paarock VanPercy, who disclosed this in an exclusive interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday, said a verification system was used to detect the fraudulent registration and operators in the industry had been advised accordingly for the necessary action. He explained that the NCA, through the verification system, was able to cross-check the ID cards used for the registration with the appropriate organisations that issued them to determine the authenticity of the ID numbers and the names used. Identity cards used for the exercise include voters ID, driving licences, passports and National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) cards. Mr VanPercy said the verification system had been fed with all the details of the registered SIMs, which were then cross-checked against the appropriate organisations. "And it was there that those anomalies were detected and pulled out for further investigations by the telecom companies to whom we reported the outcome," he explained. He mentioned the organisations where the cross-checking was done as the Electoral Commission (EC), for the voters ID; the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), for the driving licences; the Passport Office under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for the passports, and the NHIS Secretariat, for the NHIS cards. He described the attempt by some people to bypass the system as most unfortunate and warned that "we are alert to our responsibilities as far as this exercise is concerned and we will flush out from the system all frauds to ensure a clean exercise". On the next step after the detection, Mr. VanPercy said the operators were expected to contact those affected to use the right identification or risk having their lines deactivated by the June 30 deadline. "We have given enough room, in fact, a whole year, for the right things to be done and so we expect the people to comply," he said, and noted that there would be no compromises in any way once the deadline was due. Many had wondered how the NCA was going to identify the use of fake IDs for the registration of the SIMs because they were not sure of the authority's capacity, but Mr VanPercy said, "We are on top of issues and we will deal with the challenges as they come along." He gave the assurance that all was set for the exercise to end and asked those who had not yet registered to take advantage of the couple, of weeks left to register to avoid the deactivation of their lines. Source: Daily Graphic/Ghana