MTN Ghana has announced two major steps it has taken to fight mobile money fraud and airtime vanishing to protect customers.
CEO of the company, Selorm Adadevoh announced the measures at a ceremony in Accra, where he presented the half-year results of the company indicating very impressive performance in profit and revenue growth in spite of the challenging economic and regulatory environment in which it operates.
He noted that there have been some mobile money fraud incidents which involved a swap of victims’ MTN SIMs, which were then used to access the victims’ bank accounts and moneys were stolen from them.
Techfocus24 had earlier reported cases of a GHS250,000, GHS32,000 and GHS4,000 plus US$8,000 stolen from the accounts of some three Ecobank customers, after their MTN SIMs were swapped fraudulently.
Also Read: SIM Swap Fraud: Man loses GHS250k in one day
Selorm Adadevoh said as a measure to intercept any transaction on the bank account of any customers through the use of a swapped SIM, MTN has established an API (applications programming interface) through which it will alert any bank where the details of a swapped SIM is being use for a transaction.
According to him, the API will alert the bank even before the customers gets to know that their SIM has been swapped and there is an attempt to access their bank account.
“We are currently testing the API with selected organizations and we hope to make it even more robust before we roll it out fully to protect customers,” he said.
By law, SIM swap can only happen when the owner of the SIM card makes the request for a swap, possibly due to SIM damage. And the owner of the SIM is required to personally and physically be present at the respective telco’s office with his or her Ghana Card for the SIM swap to be effected.
But some fraudsters have managed to connive with workers of some telcos to get the SIM cards of other persons swapped for them to use the details to steal moneys either from their mobile money wallets or bank accounts.
MTN is currently investigating a number of cases involving SIM swap, and has even signed an MoU with the Economic and Organized Crime Office (EOCO) to fight such fraudulent practices.
They company has also been assisting a number of customers navigate the risks related to their mobile money wallets, and where a customers is defrauded through no fault of theirs, MTN intervenes to ensure the customer is not shortchanged.
Airtime Vanishing
The other measure MTN has put in place to protect customers is a clean up of its digital content platform to ensure that all subscriptions on customers’ phone, which are eating up airtime without the customers’ consent, are completed removed.
Beyond cleaning up the platform, Selorm Adadevoh also announced that MTN is getting proactive with the fight by reaching out to customers who have such subscriptions on their phones and are being charges but are not using them.
“What we have started doing is to approach affected customers and find if indeed they signed on to those subscriptions – if we find that they did not know anything about those subscriptions we help them to deactivate and be free to use their airtime how they want to,” he said.
Also Read: MTN’s digital revenue declines after clearing SMS-based services that cause airtime to vanish
The CEO noted that those proactive measures have actually impacted negatively on MTN digital revenue, which has been declining consistently since the last year.
He however, noted that, MTN has started rolling out new and innovative digital content to excite customers and the uptake so far gives them confidence that there will be a positive turn around in digital revenue going into 2024.
Also Read: #StopTheAirtimeLoot Campaign: The IMPACT
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