There are 3.3 million cell phones in the anti-extortion registry

From January 9 to 21, 3 million 388 thousand 796 cell phone lines have been linked to the official identification and unique population registration code (CURP) of those who use them as part of the official provision to prevent extortion and other crimes through the use of mobile phones, Norma Solano Rodríguez, head of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (CRT), said in an interview.

The advance is concentrated on individuals, since it is expected that operators will go to companies to register their numbers.

“There are 158 million active lines, of which 85 percent, that is, 134 million lines, are anonymous, because they are prepaid; and only 15 percent – ​​24 million – are associated with a person, they are postpaid.”

He stated that in 2024, 7.4 million extortions were recorded, of which approximately 90 percent were telephone extortions.

“The space for committing crimes with telephone lines is very wide because we have 134 million anonymous lines, and we do not know who uses them. So, when a crime is committed, the investigating authority – the Public Ministry, a judge – has no way of knowing who used that line. This link that is made as of January 9 has to do with eliminating anonymity.”

Lines that are not linked to an official identification before June 30 will be disabled starting July 1, and can only be used for emergency calls such as 911 and 089 and to receive alert messages.

However, they can be reactivated if users carry out this registration, which for the first time will be carried out by private companies: Telcel, AT&T, Movistar and the government entity Altán Redes, which will send an SMS to their prepaid customers indicating the link to the Internet site where the link is made.

For users to distinguish authentic SMS and pages from fake ones, there will be information campaigns from Telcel, AT&T and Movistar, which enabled both in-person modality and online registration.

Altán Redes, for its part, will activate an electronic platform for clients of suppliers such as Bait to connect.

Although registration is aimed at prepaid customers, there are postpaid customers who must complete the process. These are those who contracted their line years ago and did not provide their CURP.

“For people who had very old contracts, it is possible that their identification did not have CURP. In that case, they will send you a message to tell you: join.”

Legal entities must link the cell lines they assign to their employees with their federal taxpayer registry (RFC). Individuals will be able to link up to 10 numbers and companies will have no limit.

In turn, natural persons may register as the owner of the line and assign users, who are generally their family members; Companies will be able to do the same with the cell phones they assign to their collaborators.

Solano highlighted that the records that were attempted in previous administrations were going to be in charge of the government and would contain biometric data, unlike the current one, where the care of the information will be in charge of the mobile telephone operators, based on the Federal Law of Personal Data Held by Private Parties.

The head of the CRT pointed out that the companies that mobile telephone operators use to validate the identity of clients are the same ones that banks hire.

“Companies already have this experience in safeguarding the data of their postpaid users, they already have their identity validation platforms and consult reliable sources such as the National Electoral Institute.

“Telcel and AT&T, which also already have the remote process with their applications, use the identity validation mechanisms that banks use.”

He maintained that telephone companies permanently strengthen their cybersecurity mechanisms and licenses to contain and counter attacks.

“There has been no extraction of bases, there has been no leak, no exposure,” he said.

“Each telephone company will have this registry, there is no centralized national registry.”

Norma Solano indicated that starting February 7, operators will enable a consultation platform for users to verify which lines they linked and request the cancellation of those they do not recognize.

Regarding the sale of chips on social networks, which are supposedly already registered, Solano said that they cannot be used.

“They call them hollow, empty chips, because they are lines that do not exist. So what there is is fraud. They are going to sell them as registered chips, chips that no longer have a telephone line because they were transferred to another company,” he clarified.

“We established permanent communication with the cyber police. There is permanent monitoring and we also established conversation and communication with Facebook. As soon as there is a (fraudulent) site, they take it down,” he mentioned.

The antecedents of this process were the National Registry of Mobile Telephone Users (Renaut, in 2009), which was in charge of the Ministry of Communications and Transport; and the National Register of Mobile Telephony Users (Panaut, 2021), which was the responsibility of the defunct Federal Telecommunications Institute.