MOBILE telephone companies in Ghana have taken a bold step to stem activities of mobile money fraudsters, Selorm Adadevoh, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MTN Ghana said on Friday.
He said the telecom companies have embarked on a collaborative activity to curtail the activities that continually create mistrust in mobile money customers.
‘From now on, we have decided to block the telephone numbers as well as the handsets used in such activities across all networks. This will make mobile money fraud such an expensive venture to undertake,’ Adadevoh said during the Accra version of MTN’s Editor’s Forum.
He added that, ‘We have already commenced that programme and it has been running over the past two months.’
The CEO said, however, that there was the need to intensify public education to let the public know the modus operandi of the fraudsters.
In 2020 alone, the Bank of Ghana recorded at least 571.8 billion Ghana cedis ($95.05bn) worth of mobile money operations, representing 84 percent growth over the value of transactions a year earlier, with 17.5 million active mobile money accounts in the country.
As of December 2020, the West African gold, cocoa and oil exporter also had 344,000 active mobile money agents.
Another worrying menace threatening mobile money operations in the country is the armed attacks by robbers on mobile money merchants, sometimes leading to death of these merchants or their employees.