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The Head of the Investigation and Communications Unit of the Ghana Telecommunications Chamber has said that the Chamber is working with stakeholders to make mobile fraud a costly undertaking.
Derek Laryea said the Chamber was considering blocking phones used in such transactions and blacklisting the identities of such users on all telecommunications networks.
According to him, it was not expensive for people who commit fraud using mobile phones to lock their chips because the chip costs only ¢ 1.
Mr. Laryea said this at a forum in Accra to discuss mobile money fraud and the way forward, ”at a cybersecurity workshop.
He said that the systems that handle mobile money transactions were insured, but most people fell victim to scammers due to vulnerabilities on their side and said that efforts were being made to make the business expensive and unprofitable.
Godwin Kwami Tamakloe, Senior Manager, Risk Compliance and Anti-Money Laundering, MTN Ghana, said MTN had invested around $ 2.5 million in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to upgrade its existing technology to track the identity of such scammers.
He said that, in collaboration with the Ghana Police Service, more than 50 people had been arrested for their involvement in mobile money-related crimes and the names of those people would be published to deter people from indulging in such activities.
Tamakloe said the collaboration will build public trust in service providers.
Police Deputy Commissioner (ACP) Dr. Herbert G. Yankson said there was a need for stakeholders to step up education, targeting all sectors of the economy, and said records had shown that the number of cases registered in its office had shrunk from 93,000 in 2018 to 49,000 as of June 2020.
He called for collaboration between telecommunications service providers and the Police Service to facilitate the exchange of data and allow the rapid arrest of offenders.
Eric Kwaku Mensah, Acting Director of Technical Operations at the Bureau of Electronic Crimes, said mobile phone users should avoid sending push notifications, which require their PIN codes because that’s the new technique used by scammers.
He recommended that they report problems to the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) via their 292 short code or to mobile networks immediately.
Bank of Ghana Director of Fintech and Innovations, Kwame Agyapong Oppong, said there was a need to improve the citizen identification structure to allow easy information exchange between institutions to fight these crimes.
He advised the public to “report the incident of attempted fraud or fraud in advance and without delay.”
