VietNamNet Bridge – State agencies will begin checking information about pre-paid mobile phone subscribers from May 1, 2011, and will “declare death” to hundreds of thousands of mobile phone subscribers.

 

The Ministries of Information and Communication and Public Security have announced they are ready for checking personal information registered by pre-paid mobile phone subscribers in three biggest cities of Hanoi, Da Nang and HCM City. The campaign will be launched in an effort to better manage pre-paid subscribers.

 

The information checking will serve as a drastic measure to force pre-paid subscribers to obey the regulations on pre-paid subscriber management. Also, this will also help check the accuracy of the subscription registration as well as the capacity of mobile service providers.

 

As planned, the information checking will be carried out with the subscribers in Hanoi first. The information of about 4.1 million subscribers in the Hanoi area has been transferred to the police agencies for checking. These include 1.57 million subscribers of Viettel, 1.25 million subscribers of MobiFone and 1.28 million subscribers of VinaPhone.

 

According to the reports by mobile service subscribers, 100 percent of pre-paid mobile phone subscribers have provided their personal information. However, no one can say for sure about the accuracy of the information.

 

Several days ago, when reviewing the 4-year implementation of the policy on pre-paid subscriber management, state officials found out that the accuracy of the information was surprisingly low.

 

GTel Mobile, for example, reported it has 18,373 pre-paid subscribers aged more than 100 years. EVN Telecom has 3112 subscribers who are below 14 years old. A big problem is that the number of subscribers aged below 14 accounts for 0.25 percent of the total 1,224,000 pre-paid subscribers of the mobile network. Especially, 207,546 subscribers register themselves as the owners of more than four numbers.

 

It is estimated that there are now 150 million mobile phone subscribers, of which 90 percent are pre-paid subscribers (clients pay money in advance and fix the capacity of services to be used). Since the majority of mobile phone service clients are pre-paid subscribers, the clients have been offered a lot of preferences by the service providers. However, these are also the clients the service providers find it most difficult to manage.

 

Telecom companies have warned about the immeasurable consequences of the loosening of control over pre-paid mobile phone subscribers. It happens that subscribers deliberately disturb other subscribers by calling the subscribers continuously, thus affecting the people’s lives. Also, other types of crimes have also been warned by the police. In most of cases, criminals use pre-paid SIMcards and declare false information, which causes difficulties to the police in making investigations.

 

The Ministry of Information and Communication has warned that hundreds of thousands of subscribers; or even one million subscribers may be cut once the ministries discover untruthful information. However, telecom companies say they will accept to lose these subscribers, even though the subscriber cut will badly affect their business.

 

Mobile phone subscribers have been warned that they will face fines of between 5-10 million dong if they are discovered in using personal information of other people to register as subscribers for them.

 

Also, in an effort to put pre-paid subscribers under strict control, the Hanoi Information and Communication Department has requested telecom companies to “eliminate” 615 subscribers which always give SMS messages for small ads.

 

These include 227 Viettel’s subscribers, 130 VinaPhone’s, 76 MobiFone’s, 19 EVN Telecom’s two SFone’s, 3 Vietnam Mobile’s and 107 fixed line subscribers managed by the VNPT Hanoi.

 

Source: VnMedia