Regulators roll out new laws to curb mobile phone fraud

More than Kenya's 6.7 million subscribers will be compelled to register their lines with mobile phone operators before the next general election under new measures aimed at curbing crimes like hate speech and extortion that are perpetrated through handsets.

Information and Communications Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo said the stalled Finance Bill 2011 contains a clause to force SIM cards to be registered with one eye on avoiding messages that could stoke election related violence.

“To compel all mobile subscribers to register with the Communications Commissions of Kenya (CCK). We have put a provision in the Finance Bill that will empower the regulator to register all the 28 million subscribers,” Dr Ndemo told the parliamentary committee on energy and communications last Friday.

Dr Ndemo said three out of four subscribers have been registered and that the Bill, set to be on the House business this week, would force those who have not registered to be listed with mobile phone operators being held liable for SIM card abuse.

“It will now be upon the operators to ensure that SIM cards are registered or face penalties that will come with the regulations,” Dr Ndemo said.

The Finance Bill is set to return to the parliamentary agenda this week after it was shelved in December 2011 in the face of concerted efforts by MPs to initiate a raft of amendments which the Treasury said would have hurt the economy.

Dr Ndemo said the ministry would amend Section 27 of the Kenya Information and Communications Act, 1998 by inserting a paragraph that enhances CCK’s power to deal with “the registration of subscribers to telecommunication services.”

He said CCK has so far registered 21.28 million subscribers and once the law is in force, the remaining 6.7 million would be registered.

Safaricom accounts for 19.7 million subscribers followed by Airtel with 3.6 million, Orange with 3.07 million and Yu with 2.3 million.
Committee chairman James Rege said more drastic measures were needed to contain the extortion believed to be perpetrated by prisoners and hostile messages by business, romance and political rivals.

Such measures, he said, should include regulation of all social networking sites which he said had been turned into a platform for taking it out on politicians. “They do not know that both electronic and verbal abuse constitute a crime,” Mr Rege said.

Although Dr Ndemo said the law would give CCK legal backing and make mobile phone operators more accountable, the firms say they have no way of verifying the identification documents used during the registration.

“We cannot take the responsibility on things that are beyond our control. Asking operators to take responsibility is akin to asking the government to take responsibility on a driver who is found driving without a licence,” argued Telkom Kenya CEO Mickael Ghossein.

He said operators were doing their best to register SIM cards and the government as the ultimate custodian of law and order should not dodge the responsibility of protecting all citizens against political, commercial and personal affronts perpetrated through handsets.
President Kibaki directed in July last year that unregistered lines be switched off to protect the public from criminals bent on extortion, fraud and kidnapping that have been perpetrated through mobile phones.

Lack of a clear legal framework, however, has left the four mobile operators - Safaricom, Airtel, Telkom’s Kenya Orange and Essar’s yu - without a legal basis for switching off the floating lines for fear of being exposed to litigation.

Mr Ghossein said subscribers with criminal intent would to great lengths to get registered by forging identity documents and discarding the cards as soon as their devious actions were accomplished.

Other than the legal backing mobile firms had also previously raised concern as to who will be the custodian of the data they collect from their subscribers this is after consumer bodies raised concerned that the data being collected by the mobile firms can get into the wrong hands.

Alex Gakuru, the chairman of the ICT Consumer Association of Kenya, says mobile phone-based crimes will not be fully addressed until a law is passed to protect the private information that is entrusted to operators through registration.

“The operators have massive amount of public data on their hands and they are not accountable to subscribers at all on its use.”

The Data Protection Act would safeguard against misuse of the information. Corporate bodies and individual subscribers –including minors through parents or guardians are required to register their SIM cards and provide their personal details, including physical addresses.

Subscribers give vital details such as phone number, name and date of birth, gender, postal and physical address and photocopies of recognised identifiers like national ID, driving licence or passports.

After encountering a legal barrier, Safaricom last year signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Kenya Prisons Service for installation of mobile phone jamming equipment with prisons to block fraudulent calls and M-Pesa transactions.

The firm’s signal tracking data shows that most of the phone-related fraud cases originate from prisons with 1,500 fraudulent SMS and calls being made from the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in July 2011.

The prison accounted for 65 per cent of the incidents in that month with the crimes also rife at Nakuru, Meru, Kibos and Shimo la Tewa prisons.

Tricksters have over the past couple of years targeted mobile money transfer service users for extortion through schemes that keep mutating by the day. Some pretend to be relatives in financial distress needing assistance while others claim to be promoters of non-existent consumer promotions.

Recently, criminals have been forwarding confirmation messages from mobile money transfer services, only to later call claiming to have sent the money to the wrong recipient.

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