Don't divulge your pin codes to strangers, fraudsters keep upgrading - MTN Enterprise Business Officer

The Chief Enterprise Business officer at MTN Ghana, Daniel Asare has urged all customers of the various telecommunication networks to not share their various pin codes to avoid falling a victim to fraudsters.

According to him, despite several efforts by MTN and the other networks in collaboration with the security agencies to clamp down on these fraudsters, they keep upgrading themselves on daily basis with new technologies in their modula operandi.

He said, under no circumstances should anyone expose his data or pin code to anyone even if they claim to be MTN staff.

"These days fraudsters have upgraded themselves, be very vigilante with them. They are high grade fraudsters who are coming with the advance technologies. Some have even set up call centers where they use artificial intelligence and they are able to predict based on maybe some of the transactions you've done online. They are even able to steal your information. That's what we call identity fraud, and they try to use that to come onto your network", he said.

According to him, these people in the past were only targeting mobile money wallet but it has now come to the realisation of the MTN service providers that they've shifted their operations to bank accounts.

He said all this in a sideline interview with GhanaWeb's Nana Peprah after the 2023 Media and Stakeholders Forum in Kumasi.

This year's programme which was themed; "Leveraging Technology to Serve Customers through Media Excellence, was meant to educate both the media and the general public on how they can adapt to new technologies and take advantage of it in their daily activities. It was also meant to explore these technologies by the service providers in their quest to serve their customers better and to clamp down on fraudsters.

He said, in MTN's quest to deal with such fraudulent issues, they have collaborated with the cyber security and other security agencies so that they can have one front against these fraudsters.

"But in all that case, like I said that the identity text is more important. You need to protect your identity so that you don't leak information to them", he added.

He said, another measure the telecommunication network has put in place is an API that MTN has brought up to check SIM swap.

He stated: "We check SIM swap because most of these start with SIM swap and on one front, we stop all third party point from these SIM swap. In the past, you can go to an agent point and do a SIM swap. Now we've realised that most of the fraud is coming from there. Once they do the swap they try to go into your bank account and then to withdraw money, and that is where the SIM swap API comes in. So, we work with some of the bank's who are currently using it. They put in a parameter to do that check".

He added that the SIM swap API allows the bank to check the recent SIM swap or how recent was a SIM swap done and based on that, they're able to block it until you come to their office physically for them to see your true identity.

The 2023 media(editors) and stakeholder forum which was held at the Greenwood Event Center at Asokwa, Kumasi was graced by both the regional and the national officers of the MTN, media editors from all categories. Other dignitaries who graced the occasion included some chiefs.