The Minister of Communication and Digitalisation, Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, has assured Ghanaians that the SIM card re-registration exercise will weed out all fraudsters and criminals in the mobile money space.
She said despite the huge adoption of mobile money in the country, the activities of those miscreants and fraudsters who take advantage of the system to defraud innocent customers had become a major challenge to the service.
“Mobile money fraud is a great challenge to the operations of mobile money activities in Ghana and another major effort from the government is the upcoming SIM re-registration exercise, a project being led by the Ministry to weed out cyber fraud and criminality,” she stated.
Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said this in a speech that was read on her behalf by the Chief Director of the ministry, Mrs Magdalene Apenteng, at a forum which was organised by Zeepay on the theme: ‘Bridging the last frontier: a case for digital remittance post-COVID-19.’
The minister noted that due to the restrictions in mobility and closure of remittance transfer locations, remittances sent through formal digital channels greatly increased in the second quarter of 2020, indicating a trend from informal to formal transfer methods.
Moving forward, she said that trend could be a positive push in reducing risks and vulnerabilities that informal remittance transfers often entail.
“It was no surprise, therefore, that at the height of the pandemic in 2020, ladies and gentlemen, analysts all over the world argued that remittance to Africa will dry up, as we were not expected to reap any benefits from the pandemic. This was due to the fact that essential workers were anticipated to be the ones that will be hard hit by the pandemic. Yet remittance into Africa proved to be resilient and rather grew by about two to three per cent,” she stated.