Over 20,000 Fraudulent Sim Cards Exist

There are over 20,000 fraudulent sim boxes or cards that are operating in Ghana despite the registration of sim cards by mobile service providers. Haruna Iddrisu, Communications Minister, speaking at a recent meeting between the Private Newspapers & Publishers Association of Ghana (PRINPAG) and telecom operators, said that had denied both the government and telecom operators� substantial revenue. Currently, all sim cards are being registered and the registration is expected to end on September 30, 2011. This also appeared with the introduction of the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) which enables a mobile service subscriber port or change from one network to another without losing his existing number. As at the end of June, about six or seven million subscribers registration either needed to be verified or redone for invalid registration. Several hundreds of thousands Ghanaians had also not registered their sim cards. Mr. Iddrisu was however of the conviction that the registration of the sim cards would help both the government and telecom operators to eliminate fraud and deal with the growing phenomenon of anonymous crime. On other issues, he expressed worry about foreign calls that came in the prefix of existing mobile phone operator which he described as unacceptable. He added that the International Gateway Verification introduced would help verify all foreign calls coming and those operators found to be violating the law dealt with. He however urged the mobile phone service providers to be transparent in their management of the International Gateway Verification. He commended PRINPAG for creating the dialogue with the telecom operators to help sharpen the sector. �Indeed the telecommunication sector holds the key to developing this economy and everything must be done to support it.� By June this year, statistics from the National Communications Authority (NCA) revealed that Ghana had a teledensity of 80 percent penetration or 19 million plus mobile phone subscribers. MTN continues to gain market share with 174,864 new subscribers to inch up their market share to 52.19 percent from the previous 50.88 percent in May 2011. This was followed by Tigo and Vodafone with subscriber base of 3,767,664 and 3,426,095 respectively.