Over 8 million SIM cards blocked – Ursula discloses

Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, the Minister of Communication and Digitalization, said that more than 8 million SIM cards that were not registered have been blocked after the Ministry and the National Communications Authority put in place stricter rules.

She told reporters about this while she was at the 14th ITU Kaleidoscope event.

Madam Owusu-Ekuful said that people who haven’t yet re-registered their SIM cards should do so to help get rid of thieves who use the anonymity of the internet to scam people.

“SIMs have been blocked for those who linked their SIM cards to their Ghana cards in the first phase of the registration process but did not finish the registration process by doing the biometric capture phase.

“This is important because if our devices aren’t secure, we’re all in danger. There are fraudsters and criminals out there who use the anonymity of the internet and social media to scam other people. We need to make sure that no one can hide behind this anonymity.

From December 1, 2022, a lot of people went to the registration centers of their phone networks to re-register their SIM cards after they had been blocked.

As a result, some of these SIM registration centers were a mess.

The SIM re-registration process started in October 2021, when the government passed a new law that said mobile customers had to link their SIM cards to their Ghana Card, the country’s national ID card, or they could lose service.

The regulator, NCA, set November 30, 2022, as the deadline for blocking subscribers who had only finished stage one (linkage to Ghana Card) of the registration process but not stage two (biometric capture).

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