An article from citifmonline.com reports alarming statistics about mobile money crime in Ghana, per the Director of the Cyber Crime Unit of the Ghana Police Service. Chief Superintendent Herbert Gustave Yankson claimed:
- Half of mobile money subscribers have either suffered fraud or been the target of an attempted fraud.
- His unit can only prosecute 10 percent of reported cases, mostly because phoney identities were used to register SIM cards.
- Criminals are using mobile money and fake identities to handle the proceeds of crime.
Yankson stated that telco employees were amongst those arrested by his Cyber Crime Unit. These employees would access customer data in order to commit fraud.
Telcos and their agents were also said to be failing customers in other ways. Yankson asserted that agents of telecom companies continued to break the law by selling pre-registered SIM cards. Yankson believe telcos have not implemented sufficient checks on customer identities, with the result that fraudsters can use fake identities to register SIM cards. He observed that the lack of a national database was used as an excuse for telcos failing to perform real-time identity checks.
You can read the full citifmonline article here.
