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