Useless telecoms officials

Senator Win Gatchalian accused the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) of “sleeping on the job” after thousands of SIM cards were found in raids of POGO hubs in Pasay, Bamban and Porac. The raiding teams from the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) tagged these supposedly POGO operations as hotbeds of illegal activities by foreign criminal syndicates victimizing people here and abroad. They give our country a bad international reputation.

There was this article in The Times of London last week about how stolen iPhones in the British Capital end up in China’s tech hub city of Shenzhen. But sending the stolen iPhones to China is not the first option of the thieves. They want to sell the phones in London first. Failing that, the phones end up in China to be sold as second-hand or cannibalized for parts.

Selling a stolen iPhone is difficult. It can be traced and rendered unusable. So, the thieves send threatening messages to the owner to detach the iPhone from his Apple account. Doing so will enable them to sell the phone.

The Times reported, “One of the messages said the victim should remove the device from his Apple account ‘because the phone is going to be auctioned on the black market with your personal information.’ The threats escalated, and eventually he and his family were threatened with rape and murder. ‘This was a random phone number from the Philippines, where clearly no one knows us,’ he said, ‘but I was surprised by how brutal the language was.’”

That made us look like a failed third-world country, a hotbed of criminal tech activities like the lawless Myanmar-China border which the Washington Post reported on last week. The criminals used a SIM card issued by one of our telcos.

The SIM cards found at the POGO raids are presumably used for criminal purposes as the London story relates. Our SIM card registration law, because of lax NTC enforcement, has proven toothless in preventing use by criminal groups.

Our telcos were never really enthusiastic about mandatory SIM registration. Doing it right adds to business expense. Their compliance was bare minimum. Now they are blaming the lack of an adequate national ID system as the