Although there have been sanctions against telecommunications operators involved in call masking, SIM-Boxing and related fraud, the menace still persists.
About this time last year, The Guardian exclusively brought the issue to light.
This spurred the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to carry out some investigations, leading to the sanctioning and suspension of some operators earlier this year. Some of these suspensions were later lifted.
Lately, however, these menaces have reappeared, even more intensely, fuelling concern the country could be hit by a new wave of insecurity.
This has prompted experts and stakeholders in the sector to call for fresh measures to tackle the challenge.
Besides threat to security, especially in cyberspace, revenue meant for government coffers are also blocked.
A 10 per cent tax on all calls, telephony and telecommunications services goes to the government.
A masked call happens when an international calling number (Caller Line Identity) is masked as local number traffic.
It is a deliberate attempt by a fraudster to avoid paying the correct International Termination Rate (ITR) for international calls, paying instead the Local Termination Rate (LTR).
For example, when the number is masked as a local call, an operator pays N3.90 LTR and not N24.40 ITR.
The process allows operators to terminate inbound international telecoms traffic as local calls, so they don’t have to pay ITR, which is the interconnection charge set by telecoms traffic carriers as carrier-to-carrier charges.
A SIM Box fraud is a setup where fraudsters install SIM boxes with multiple prepaid SIM cards.
The fraudster can bring calls through VOIP (through internet) and terminate international calls through local phone numbers in the respective country, to make it appear as a local call, by initiating the call through local SIM installed in the SIM box.
The Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), the Department of State Services (DSS), and Committees of the House of Representatives and Senate have on several occasions expressed concern on the menace.
The Guardian learnt that as at March, call masking had cut the volume of international calls by 59 per cent. Industry analysts claimed this decline started from October 2016 when NCC jacked up ITR, which refers to the rate paid to local operators by international operators to terminate calls in Nigeria.
According to them, before NCC’s intervention, the ITR was considered very low and was creating payment imbalance, as Nigerian operators paid the international operators in dollars to deliver international calls, a situation that worsened as the value of the naira plunged.
Speaking with The Guardian, the Director-General, Delta State Innovation Hub (DSHUB), Chris Uwaje, described the challenge as grievous, saying terrorists such as Boko Haram could explore it.
According to him, there is the need to ask why the menace was not there before and why it exists now.
Uwaje urged NCC to have an intrusion data mechanism that would help it to know the inlet and outlet of a call before the carrier executes its operation.
“They will sit as the man in the middle and be able to trace some of the acts. This is more of a data issue because calls are data-centric.
So, when a call is originated, it originates from ‘free plus state of zeros and one’, so you can match exactly, who is originating it, who the intermediary is and where it is going.
Having said that, it means we have reached a stage where NCC would have engineers with data algorithms experience, to be resident in each ISP data centre or where their headquarters are.
The security issue now is, if you want to trace a call to Boko Haram and they are using call masking to do that, automatically it becomes difficult to trace and any decision made from that move could be disastrous.
“Masking is to cover and it usually comes with intent. It is a crime. Why do you mask a number when automatically your caller ID is the one that will take precedence?
