This newspaper has been briefed by the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GT&T) about a disturbing racket in which bogus telephone service providers are employing multiple cellular services to receive overseas calls and route them to local numbers, bypassing the company’s own licensed network and, in effect, running private ‘services’ at GT&T’s expense. It is, by all accounts, a major racket, involving up to a few hundred cellular numbers, which costs both GT&T and the state millions of dollars in lost revenue.
What particularly attracted our attention during the briefing was what the company says is the high demand for cellular services among the racketeers which has had a knock-on effect on the demand for SIM cards.
While GT&T has set its vendors a limit of two cellular services (SIM cards) per customer the bogus operators have devised their own means of securing multiple SIMS which, GT&T believes, could include ‘arrangements’ with buyers who simply move from one vendor to the other, in each case, purchasing the allowable limit of two services than re-selling these to the bypass operators. Some vendors are also believed to be involved in the racket.
Without wishing to trivialize GT&T’s and the government’s financial losses, the real worry here has to do with the proliferation of SIM cards and the implications of this for criminal enterprise, national security and for the buyers themselves.
Possessed of the ability to make one or even several cellular calls without having the service traced to them, persons with bad intentions – criminals, saboteurs et al – can run rings round the authorities since the information on the number from which the call was made or the number to which the call was made, which is available to GT&T – and which the company is legally obliged to surrender to the authorities in cases of criminal and other investigations – has to be with the purchaser of that particular service who may not necessarily be the user of that service.
This newspaper was reliably informed of a recent case of someone who was in the market for forty SIMS in circumstances where no one has a clue as to whether that person is a bypass operator or whether the forty SIMS (or forty cellular numbers) are to be used for some other perhaps more sinister purpose.
It is of course up to the critical parties, GT&T, DIGICEL, the National Frequency Management Unit and the security services to address this worrying development. GT&T says that its first step as a service provider is to warn unsuspecting members of the public that what may appear to them to be a civic-minded gesture of using their own ID card and other personal information to secure a cellular on behalf of someone else could land them in trouble up to their gills, since, were that SIM (cell number) to turn up in the course of some unwholesome occurrence (a police investigation into a robbery, for example) it is the purchaser who, in the first instance, will have to face the music.
We believe that this warning is well worth heeding.