By Ngozi Onyeakusi

 

The Nigerian Communications Commission has decried the nation’s loss of $3bn worth of revenue to call masking and SIM boxing activities in the country.

Consequently, at the 85th edition of the Telecom Consumer Parliament in Lagos, telecoms operators lament that they were losing about 2.5 million minutes per day to these fraudulent activities.

On the actions that had been taken by the commission to combat the menace, the Executive Vice-Chairman, NCC, Prof Umar Danbatta, said the NCC had tightened the SIM registration process across all networks to reduce the availability of Subscriber Identification Module cards for SIM boxing as well as address the security issues around the availability of pre-registered SIMs.

According to him, the action was necessary as some arrests made in Lagos two weeks ago showed that the perpetrators of SIM boxing had over 100 SIM cards registered with fictitious names and used them to divert international calls.

Call masking or refilling is a practice in which international calls are terminated in Nigeria as local numbers, using illegal SIM boxes loaded with several numbers.