The sale of cell-phone chips will be temporarily limited to the official branches of mobile phone service providers, according to a statement made by the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA) on Monday.
The measure will be enforced for three months starting May 20, until the companies resolve distribution breaches with their agents.
According to the NTRA's statement, campaigns launched in collaboration with the Interior Ministry have managed to seize 28,000 illegally sold chips. It added that the involved agents violated the NTRA’s rules which stipulate the selling of only one chip to every customer after submitting an ID.
"In the context of combating fraud in the selling of mobile phone lines and its impact in spreading mobile crimes, the Communications and Information Technology Minister Khaled Negm has met with Egypt’s Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat to discuss legal procedures undertaken by prosecutions nationwide against fraud by means of using data from fake IDs, thereby threatening national security," the NTRA said in an earlier statement on Sunday.
Negm said he had instructed the NTRA to tighten control over the selling of mobile phone lines, as well as ensure the accuracy of mobile phone users’ data "as those lines are used in terrorist and criminal acts".
The total number of mobile phone subscribers in Egypt was down by 5.4 percent in January 2015, totalling 95.5 million subscribers, compared with 100.31 million in January 2014, according to the Communications and Information Technology Ministry.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
