Maputo, 17 Jan (AIM) – The National Communications Institute of Mozambique (INCM), the regulatory body for telecommunications, on Tuesday began to implement new rules for the registration of mobile phone SIM cards.
In principle, all SIM cards should already be registered, and no phone company is allowed to issue new SIM cards without registration. This time, registration will be biometric, using the fingerprints and facial recognition of the mobile phone subscribers.
Millions of Mozambicans, who believed they were already registered, will now have to re-register, with threats that their phones will be cut off, if they do not.
The justification for registration has always been to prevent the criminal use of cell phones. Cell phones are used, for example, by kidnap gangs to contact the relatives of their victims and demand ransoms. A variety of swindles and con-tricks also depend on the use of cell phones.
So one might have expected the INCM to tell the public how successful registration has been in tracking down criminals. But no such information is available, and it is not at all clear whether any criminals at all have been caught because of their use of registered SIM cards.
The biometric SIM card registration is currently in a pilot phase, which will run until 16 June. In the pilot phase, registration is not obligatory – but it will become so after 16 June. As from 2025, those whose SIM cards are not registered risk having their numbers disconnected.
An unwelcome change in the new system is that every owner of a SIM card must register it in person – nobody can register a SIM card on behalf of a third party. Thus the practice of entire families delegating one representative to register the SIM cards of all family members will come to an end. The inevitable result will be even longer queues to register the SIM cards.
INCM administrator Constancio Trigo said biometric registration is intended to make it easier to identify those who commit telecommunications crimes.
He told reporters that every month and average of 5,000 frauds and swindles are committed using the telecommunications networks. Biometric registration “seeks to allow the easy identification of criminals”, he said.
With the new regulations each mobile phone subscriber will be given a Single Telecommunications Number (NUTEL) which the subscribers will use in all their dealings with phone companies, regardless of how many mobile phone and SIM cards they may own.
(AIM)
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