CELL GIANTS NOT FULLY COMPLIANT ’

IT WOULD take “a very large court case” to force cellphone companies to make all their systems fully compliant to the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act (Rica).

According to University of Pretoria cyber law lecturer Sylvia Papadopoulos, though Rica was aligned to most legislation around the world that verified personal information, cellphone network providers appeared to misinterpret it.

“Media releases from service providers show that they interpret Rica (to mean) that they should register a user once. This is a very thin argument,” she said.

The lack of compliance has resulted in many people falling victim to what has been termed SIM swap fraud.

SIM swap fraud sees con artists deregistering a cellphone number of an unsuspecting user, then swapping the sim card to gain access to the user’s bank account and eventually clean it out.

“Rica works to a certain degree and could do with some fine-tuning. You have service providers and they all need to work towards the same goal and at the moment there is no incentive and reason to do that.

“It would probably take a very large court case to make them fully compliant,” Papadopoulos said.

She said consumers who have fallen victim to the SIM swap fraud should attempt to seek recourse through the National Consumer Commission.

“There is no one who has taken time and money to litigate against cellphone companies on the fraud.”

South African Centre for Information Security chief executive Beza Belayneh said Rica’s advantage was that it has helped to convict cyber crime criminals.

“The challenge is that the legislation has not yet matured.

“You find instances where people give any kind of name, including that of a dog, and this is only discovered by the time a SIM card has committed a violation, ” Belayneh said.

He said cellphone companies should enforce the Rica system on everyone who stays in or visits SA.

IT security provider Trustwave’s country manager Andrew Kirkland said some cellphone retailers took shortcuts when dealing with Rica.

“You would find that they do not want regulation and they tend to take short cuts because a lot of the time due to deadlines and targets that have been set,” he said.

Kirkland warned that criminals were always watching how mobile operators dealt with their customers. –