By Joel Chirwa

MACRA HEAD OFFICE

Mzuzu, July 30, Mana: Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) says despite introducing a regulation that enforces registration of sim cards as a measure to curb fraud and other related cyber-crimes, the initiative is paying little dividends.

MACRA Deputy Director of Consumer Affairs, Kelious Mlenga, made the remarks Friday in Mzuzu during an interaction meeting between the authority and the media.

“We made registration of sim cards mandatory for easy detection of suspects who are behind crimes in the mobile money sector.

“But we later discovered that people are lending each other national IDs when registering a sim card, thereby impacting negatively on the intervention,” said Mlenga.

He said because of the challenge, it was discovered that those caught for being suspected of committing electronic fraud were not real offenders only that their national identification cards were used in the acquisition of the sim cards which are used by the fraudsters.

Mlenga said to that effect, the authority has created a taskforce comprising the police, mobile money service providers and Reserve Bank of Malawi as a main authority in the financial sector in stepping up our efforts to curb such crimes.

“Initially, all these stakeholders were working in isolation but at the moment we are working as a team and we are able to block such sim cards once they are immediately identified,” he said.

He further disclosed that MACRA is in process of acquiring equipment that will be used to detect gadgets that are used in committing the crime.

The MACRA official added that most of the times when criminals have swindled their victims of their money, they just replace sim cards and continue using the mobile gadgets used in the crime.

 “But with the gadget detecting machine in place, it will mean that such gadgets are easily identified and rendered useless,” said Mlenga.

In his remarks, Head of Cyber Security Expert at Malawi Police Services, Gladson Kubwalo, appealed to authorities in the tertiary training institutions to consider introducing degree programmes in Forensic Sciences.

“Currently, we have very few experts in our department and I propose that tertiary training institutions should start considering introducing degree programmes in Forensic Sciences so that we have enough personnel in this profession,” said Kubwalo.

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