Criminal activities of some staffers of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) who engage in duplicating the National Identification Numbers (NIN) of some persons has been linked to telecom subscribers’ lines being barred despite linking their lines to their NIN.

Political Economist NG reports that in recent weeks, many telecom subscribers have had their lines barred by service providers for allegedly not linking their lines to their NIN.

A visit to some offices of telecom service providers by Political Economist NG reporters showed growing queues of subscribers whose lines were either barred or were listed to be barred from active service.

While a majority of the affected subscribers said they had long linked their SIM to their NIN, but were being asked to do so again, others said their lines had been marked for barring by the telcos, Political Economist NG observed.

Explaining the situation, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) attributed the development to  the activity of third-party agents who duplicate NINs for unsuspecting telecom subscribers.

Commenting on the issue, the commission’s Director of Compliance, Mr Efosa Idehen, at a recent event said, “On the issue of already registered SIMs and NIN, the issue is that some of those SIMs were registered with duplicated NINs.” NIMC is the issuing authority for NIN.

Efosa explained further: “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.”

The director noted that the commission was committed to ensuring that SIMs could be traced directly to their owners.

On his part, the Executive Vice Chairman of the Commission, Aminu Maida, stated, “We want to protect the integrity of our mobile numbers. When we don’t use it for a while, it has to be recycled and this exposes people to fraud.”

To battle this fraud, the EVC noted that the NCC is set to roll out consequences to deter its growth. He said, “We want to create more awareness about this so that people can understand that there is a window during which if they do not use their line, it can be allocated to another person.

“People are using mobile numbers for a lot of frauds today and this is because there is no consequence. We are coming up with a regulation that will make sure there is a consequence for using your mobile for fraud.”

On the existence of third-party agents to register NIN, an official of NIMC who did not want to be named told Political Economist NG that since the introduction of third-party agents to register people for NIN, there has been a muddling up of the process.

“Some of us have queried why NIMC should engage third-party agents to register Nigerians in an exercise that involves capturing the security details of these Nigerians including thumb-print, photographs, signatures among others. This has its negative effect as some of the third-party agents may not understand the sensitive nature of their brief,” the source said.