The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has recently addressed the issue of subscribers who have had their SIMs barred despite linking them to their National Identification Numbers (NIN).
The NCC said that the cause of the issue is the duplication of NINs by third-party agents, who register these numbers for unsuspecting telecom subscribers.
During a media briefing in Lagos, the Director of Compliance for the NCC, Mr Efosa Idehen, explained: “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.”