Europe 1 with AFP 17:13 pm, September 08, 2023

Police in the Philippines used a monkey photo to activate SIM cards and prove that it was still very easy to get a mobile number under a false identity to commit SMS scams, despite tighter legislation.

Fake jobs, fake loans, so-called lottery winnings, even imaginary loves: misleading text messages are a plague in this Southeast Asian country of 114 million inhabitants. Elected officials denounced this week in the Senate the mechanisms for allocating lines that are too lax.

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And the latest legislation of 2022, requiring anyone who wants to buy a SIM card to provide identity information and a photo, has not had the desired effects. The new regulation, in force since October 2022, also applies to tens of millions of existing users who risked disconnection if they did not register properly before July 25.

"The system is really inefficient"

The Philippine telecom regulator found that the number of misleading messages had "increased significantly" instead of decreasing. To demonstrate how easy it is to pass through the controls of telephone operators, a video was presented in which a police officer activates several SIM cards with an identity card bearing the photo of a smiling monkey.

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"The system is really inefficient, if you can see a monkey in a photo and still validate" the line opening, explained an elected official during a parliamentary hearing. More than 118 million prepaid and unpaid SIM cards are registered in the Philippines, said the head of the National Telecom Commission, Ella Lopez.

Cheap SIM cards

To buy a SIM card, it is enough to present one of the many identity documents issued by the authorities but none is biometric. Fraudsters, including online gambling operators, use cheap SIM cards that can be purchased for 40 pesos (0.66 euros), said Jeremy Lotoc, head of the cybercrime division at the National Bureau of Investigation.

"The problem is that when you have a SIM card (for fraud) and it works, you then throw it away. So it's very difficult to pinch them," he added.