The Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation has announced that it has instituted plans of deactivating all SIM cards yet to be registered by November 30, 2022.
The Ministry, in a statement issued on November 11, warned that “all SIM cards which have completed the first stage of the registration exercise but not done the second phase will be blocked from accessing data services on 20th November 2022 and completely deactivated on 30th November 2022.”
The statement added that it is part of measures taken by the Ministry to reduce SIM-related fraud incidents, which have currently seen a decline with the commencement of the exercise.
It further warned people to desist from using Ghana cards of other people in the registration process, which they say is largely to blame for the huge numbers of people that have linked their Ghana Card details to their SIM cards but are having challenges capturing their biometric data.
“One key reason why some of those who have linked phone numbers to Ghana cards have been unable to complete the bio capture of stage two is because they used other people’s cards to link their numbers. This includes vendors who used the cards of others without the knowledge or consent of the card owners. Their inability to complete phase two attests to the robustness of the authentication process designed into the SIM registration architecture. It will flush out all fakes. You cannot use someone else’s Ghana card to register your SIM.”
It also revealed that some 30,011,082 have completed linking their Ghana Card to their SIM Number in the first stage and 20,892,970 subscribers, had completed the SIM card registration (linkage and biometric capture).