La Jornada: Without proving that cell phone registration inhibits crime

Nearly 160 governments around the world have established some type of mandatory registration for prepaid cell lines, but the relationship with an effective reduction in related crimes has not been demonstrated, according to the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, an advocate for the mobile communications industry in Latin America.

The group maintains that the design of a cell line registry is excessively expensive and can generate exclusion costs and parallel markets for fraudulently registered SIM cards.

A Banamex calculation maintains that at the actual rate of registration of prepaid lines, nearly 26 million lines will not be linked from now until December (and would face effective suspension), which means that the loss for the telecommunications sector would be close to 1,900 million pesos per month.

The estimate is based on the average monthly revenue per line reported for the mobile market and applies a conservative adjustment to reflect that the prepaid segment – ​​the most exposed to the risk of disconnection – generates a lower than average revenue per user. Brazil has had mandatory SIM registration since 2003, while Pakistan is often cited as one of the most aggressive cases of implementation. In India, attempts were made to link mobile lines with the national biometric identity system; However, in 2018 the Supreme Court upheld the general validity of the scheme, but declared it unconstitutional, according to an analysis that Banamex carried out on the linking of cell lines to the Unique Population Registration Code (CURP) ordered by the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (CRT).

He explained that, in the case of Brazil, for decades the law allowed any user to enter an identification number without real verification. “The registry existed on paper; fraud existed in practice.”

In Pakistan, following the terrorist attack in Peshawar (December 2014), the country deployed a biometric verification process for mobile lines; Years later, the authority carried out operations against illegal activations, false biometrics and sales channels that circumvented official verification, “which suggests that the registry only increased the sophistication of the crime.”