(Business in Cameroon) - The Cameroonian subsidiary of the South African telecommunications operator MTN International announced on 11 April 2016 in an official communiqué that it was launching a national campaign to re-register its subscribers. This campaign which will last until June 2016, the operator stressed, “is meant to verify the identity of MTN subscribers and register those who are not yet subscribers. Through this new campaign, MTN Cameroon is working to fully comply with the directives of the Prime Minister, who, through a decree issued on 3 September 2015, provided new directions to mobile operators in the subscribers registration process”.

To all its subscribers, MTN Cameroon is advising that to ensure that their previous registrations comply with the new requirements formulated by the government, each one of them “can send a free SMS with the word “Status” to 8758. If the return SMS indicates the registration as incomplete, the subscriber must absolutely get registered again, to avoid having their number deactivated from the network starting from 1^st July 2016”.

On this subject, we can recall that during the 2014-2015 period, mobile operators in Cameroon had to suspend about 6 million mobile chips deemed “suspect”, the telecoms regulatory body revealed in October 2015, during a meeting on the economic consequences of the Simbox fraud in Cameroon.

The new directives from the government in terms of registration of subscribers in the mobile sector, we note, come in a context marked by the terrorist attacks committed in Cameroon by the Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram, attacks in which mobile telephones were sometimes used to activate the explosives carried by kamikazes.

At the same time, the Sim box fraud is growing in the country. This practice which consists in, through the use of a batch of SIM cards, making international calls as if they were national calls, officially led to the loss of about FCfa 18 billion by the four local mobile operators in 2015, and cost FCfa 4 billion to the Cameroonian state in unpaid taxes on the calls thus diverted.

BRM