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YAOUNDE, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- Mobile operators in Cameroon have nullified around six million SIM cards over the past two years which were considered as suspicious, a business organization said Saturday.
It was disclosed in a statement issued by the Business in Cameroon after a meeting centered on the economic impact of the SIM box fraud in Cameroon.
"We found out from operators' database that some people registered as many as 100 to 200 SIM cards with one national identity card and this is extremely suspicion," said Thomas Marcellin Manyanye, sub-director of Cameroon's Telecommunications Regulatory Agency (ART) information system.
A SIM box user is one who uses many of the cards to receive international calls as though they were locals so as to avoid paying the call rates applied on international calls.
In order to end such practice, a decree signed on Sept. 3, 2015 by Cameroonian Prime Minister Philemon Yang limited the number of SIM cards which can be registered by a user to 12 in addition to prohibiting SIM cards from being sold on the streets.
The new measures were not only to bolster the identification system of phone subscribers in the country but also to considerably help in fighting the SIM box fraud, a phenomenon that has cost Cameroon nearly 22 billion CFA francs since the beginning of 2015.
