The Nigerian Communications Commission, (NCC) has spoken about the duplication of National Identification Numbers and the issue of barred SIMs (NIN).
The NCC has reported that fresh subscribers are complaining of having their SIM barred even though they have linked their numbers to their NIN.
Many subscribers have complained that their SIM has been barred despite being linked to their NIN.
NCC explained that this experience is due to the intrusion of third party telecom providers who duplicate NINs for subscribers.
Reporting on the issue, the NCC Director, Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement, Mr. Efosa Idehen said:
“On the issue of already registered SIMs and NIN, the issue is that some of those SIMs were registered with duplicated NINs.
“When an audit of the system is carried out, actual owners of the NINs reclaim them. We have a lot of things that people do within the industry, especially SIM-NIN linkage for money purposes. Yes, people register their SIMs and try to link their NINs but the agents doing those registrations do a lot of damage.
“We are seeing this and want to correct it. We want a situation where when people say they are the owners of their SIMs, there is no doubt.”
