Short Code To Check Linked SIMs To Ghana Card Out
The National Communications Authority (NCA) has announced a short code to verify the number of SIM cards linked to a Ghana card.
The uniform code can be accessed across all networks.
It will be active on May 1, according to the Director-General of the NCA, Joseph Anokye.
From next week Monday, subscribers can dial *402*1# to check SIMs linked to their Ghana card.
Subscribers who detect anomalies through the process will have the opportunity to rectify them by visiting their Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) or customer care centres.
At a press conference on April 26, Mr Anokye explained, “NCA also directed MNOs to ensure that consumers that want to delink SIM cards from their Ghana cards after a full KYC eyeballing of the consumer by the MNOs. This delinking can also be done only at the consumer care centres to ensure only the right owners of SIMs are allowed to delink.”
This is meant to deal with complaints by some subscribers that their Ghana cards have been linked to SIM cards unknown to them.
For businesses, he noted that the MNOs have been requested to develop enterprise work-based systems to check and delink SIMs that are no longer in use or unwanted by the business.
Individual subscribers have the opportunity to register up to 10 SIM cards with a Ghana card, whereas businesses can register more than that.
Reports confirmed by the NCA indicate that some individuals registered more than 10 SIM cards with a single Ghana card.
“At the beginning of the exercise, the NCA noticed that the classification fill (Individual or Business) for the SIM registration exercise shared with the Central SIM register was not being completed. The MNOs who were not completing the classification fill requested time to reconfigure their databases in order to properly classify the SIM registrations and share the same with the CSR,” Mr Anokye explained noting that the gap gave some subscribers the chance to register more than ten SIMs.
“Also,” he stated, “at the beginning of the exercise the MNOs complained that a lot of their agents did not have smartphones required for registration of new sims in line with the current sim registration process. As a result, the MNOs were allowed to use their legacy platforms which only required the future phone for registration. This opened the process to abuse by some actors in the registration process in stage one.”
He said the Authority directed these MNOs to discontinue the use of the legacy platforms by NCA after realisation.
This, he said, only affected the first stage of the registration exercise and used the opportunity to discredit reports of unauthorised abuse of the Authority’s databases.
