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The Minister of Communication, Haruna Iddrisu has noted with concern the awkward posture of some telecom operators in curbing the incidence of SIM fraud in the country. He said while the security agencies and some telecom operators are in sync with the government to rid the country of fraudsters who use SIM boxes to bypass the country�s international gateway system, other operators have supported people to perpetrate crimes against the state. �Recently, we arrested a British citizen with over 3,000 SIMs with the support of one network operator. Are these operators committed to ensuring that we hold persons accountable for what they do with a SIM? �We have instances where somebody has walked in to us offering to name other people and networks involved in SIM fraud business if we could halt prosecuting some of the arrested fraudsters, and we have said no. This must go on. �The British citizen we arrested made US$9.2 million a month, and that is a loss of revenue to operators and government alike. Yet when we contacted one of the operators, they failed to provide support for us to prosecute the person. �Illegal SIM in Ghana is costing all of us, including the operators, not less than US$5million loss every month. It undermines quality of service,� he said. Per their practice, those �unidentified� persons (criminals) rely on the use of a Simbox or GSM gateway card to intercept inbound international calls, which are first routed to a local number and then the same call is re-directed from the local number to the number the foreign call was originally meant for. The practice has persisted for some time, heightening the deep-seated problems inherent in the mobilisation of state revenue. While the network operators and security agencies have succeeded in tracking and arresting a number of illegal SIM-Box operators, the practice is still on the rise. Since March last year, the number of sham lines detected on networks totalled 102,689 at the end of July this year. Mr. Iddrisu said monitoring of the country�s international gateway by the Global Voice Group has proven very beneficial to the economy and is yielding dividends, as statistics available point to the fact that the incidence of fraud numbers detected has been declining in some networks, and at the same time yielded revenue for the government. �Telecom operators must support government to minimize, if not eliminate, fraud associated with the management of their international gateway system. We have evidence. We have paid US$53million to the consolidated fund out of a policy intervention some of the telecom operators kicked against. �But the policy of monitoring the international gateway was not for the purpose of revenue. Revenue became a consequence of it. Our primary purpose was to reduce fraud, and let the telecom companies challenge me whether calls emanating from abroad do not enter Ghana as if they were domestic calls,� he said.