Useless telecoms officials

Senator Win Gatchalian accused the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) of “sleeping on the job” after thousands of SIM cards were found in raids of POGO hubs in Pasay, Bamban and Porac. The raiding teams from the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) tagged these supposedly POGO operations as hotbeds of illegal activities by foreign criminal syndicates victimizing people here and abroad. They give our country a bad international reputation.

There was this article in The Times of London last week about how stolen iPhones in the British Capital end up in China’s tech hub city of Shenzhen. But sending the stolen iPhones to China is not the first option of the thieves. They want to sell the phones in London first. Failing that, the phones end up in China to be sold as second-hand or cannibalized for parts.

Selling a stolen iPhone is difficult. It can be traced and rendered unusable. So, the thieves send threatening messages to the owner to detach the iPhone from his Apple account. Doing so will enable them to sell the phone.

The Times reported, “One of the messages said the victim should remove the device from his Apple account ‘because the phone is going to be auctioned on the black market with your personal information.’ The threats escalated, and eventually he and his family were threatened with rape and murder. ‘This was a random phone number from the Philippines, where clearly no one knows us,’ he said, ‘but I was surprised by how brutal the language was.’”

That made us look like a failed third-world country, a hotbed of criminal tech activities like the lawless Myanmar-China border which the Washington Post reported on last week. The criminals used a SIM card issued by one of our telcos.

The SIM cards found at the POGO raids are presumably used for criminal purposes as the London story relates. Our SIM card registration law, because of lax NTC enforcement, has proven toothless in preventing use by criminal groups.

Our telcos were never really enthusiastic about mandatory SIM registration. Doing it right adds to business expense. Their compliance was bare minimum. Now they are blaming the lack of an adequate national ID system as the reason for their failure to ascertain legitimacy of registered owners. They could have been presented with IDs from Claro Recto Avenue. Examining the confiscated SIM cards from the POGO raids will tell us more. Let the telcos explain how those SIM cards got there.

It doesn’t help that the forever useless NTC doesn’t seem to have a program or a system that will assure proper compliance to the intent and provisions of the law.

For instance, I still get spam and scam messages on my phones, even on the phone whose number I have kept private. I keep on getting messages for some get rich quick scam, offers for loans using my car’s certificate of registration and offers to sell or lease condo units. Actually, the most abusive scammers are the telcos who barrage their consumers with upgrade offers to the services we already have with them.

There should be a way by which the public can send to NTC screenshots of these offending scam and spam offers and from there, NTC will instruct the telco to disconnect that number. Then we should get a text message from the telco or NTC about what action was taken to show NTC is doing something more useful than sending us spam messages in the guise of public service announcements.

There must also be an existing technology that will enable telcos to screen text or calls from abroad that obviously comes from a machine that spams or scams. We should not take calls from numbers we do not recognize. But the telcos should protect their subscribers by proactively dealing with unwanted callers from abroad. The telcos should earn their keep. They make billions from us, the least they can do is protect us from spammers and scammers.

The problem with NTC is that it seems to be staffed by clueless old bureaucrats who got their positions only because of political connections. What NTC needs are savvy young digital natives who know how to navigate technology. It is the same problem with DICT. It doesn’t seem to have the right kind of staff who understands how all these technologies work. DICT looks helpless as hackers are having a holiday with government websites.

It is interesting that “Kangkong” the 24-year-old hacker working with a newspaper’s technology editor, has not gone beyond elementary school but learned the technology by himself and has proven very adept at it. He claims to have hacked 93 websites of government agencies and private companies. If BBM can harness such native talent for good, the government’s technology agencies will better run.

Why haven’t NTC and DICT explained the published findings of the PAOCC that confiscated the SIM cards, cell phones and the other computer facilities apparently being used for criminal activities in the raided POGO hubs? Shouldn’t the telcos that issued those SIMs be identified and sanctioned?

Indeed, publicly shaming the telcos opens them to reputation risks and that will spur them to take their obligations for SIM registration more seriously.

There are 46 buildings in the Porac POGO complex, a self-sustaining mini city with a restaurant, a grocery, karaoke bar, pharmacy and salon. It is right for PAOCC to seek forfeiture of assets including land and building for having been used in criminal activities. These could be immediately converted to classrooms, solving a current shortage.

There are so many things in our beloved country that don’t work. We have to pick them up one by one to shame the authorities into doing something useful for a change. Or replace our lousy telecom bureaucrats with tech savvy guys like the remorseful “Kangkong.”

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco