SIMs may be registered with animal face, different names —NBI

SIM cards may be registered even with a photo of an animal like a monkey, an official of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) told a Senate committee on Tuesday.

At a hearing of the Committee on Public Services on the implementation of the SIM card registration law, NBI Cybercrime Division chief Jeremy Lotoc said his team bought SIM cards from different telcos and tried registering using "the face of an animal and different names."

"Pumasok pa rin, actually," Lotoc said.

(The registration still went through.)

Lotoc then showed the panel a sample of a SIM card application with a face of a monkey on it.

He said law enforcers are having difficulty in tracking suspects due to the unreliable information of SIM owners.

Representatives from Dito, Globe and Smart during the hearing said that they have processes and features in verifying information and data submitted to them.

Dito manager of regulatory and government affairs Niño Martin Cruz said the provider uses optical card recognition for ID "that basically replicates the data or information that you see in the ID."

Cruz said Dito also relies on the "face liveliness where the SRA (SIM Registration Act) platform recognizes or finds traces of biometric."

Asked by Senate Majority Leader Joel Villanueva if these features should mean that the photo of a monkey should not have been registered, Cruz said, "supposedly."

Globe head of policy division, corporate, and legal services group Ariel Tubayan explained, "Medyo siguro lumulusot nga po yun. Yung mga pictures kasi nga po precisely that is the reasons why when the bill was being deliberated we asked to have access to government ID issuers para query system lang po na sana valid ba tong ID na 'to o hindi."

Smart vice president and head of regulatory affairs Roy Ibay said the telco has processes in place to verify submitted information and data.

"Smart also employed an optical character recognition technology not only to help Smart verify submitted information and data but also to protect and secure subscribers," Ibay said.

Asked anew by Villanueva if the Smart system will not accept the photo of a monkey, he said, "Actually meron din po kasing technical glitches the reason why I think during the IRR (implementing rules and regulations) we wanted basically to perfect this optical character recognition technology."

"I think the problem with technology is that it is not simply a plug and play solution. Sometimes you have to undergo a data stage and that was what we feel with the oncoming deadline of the SIM registration," he said.

Senator Grace Poe, panel head, suggested amending the IRR of the law to include facial recognition.

“For the information of our colleagues, Dito is actually implementing facial recognition together with the ID. But, Globe and Smart resisted that it be included in the IRR. So I just think we have to tweak the IRR,” Poe said.

“It's actually looking like what we have now is not really sufficient so we will have to go back to the drawing board and probably with the cooperation of the NTC (National Telecommunications Commission), maybe we can amend the IRR,” she added.

The SIM Registration Act or Republic Act 11934 seeks to curb crimes using the platform including text and online scams by regulating the sale and the use of SIMs through mandating registration to end-users.

As of September 3, the NTC said a total of 118,908,469 SIM cards have been registered.

Poe's committee conducted the hearing amid the continued proliferation of text scams.

"Gumawa tayo ng batas pero mukhang nagkukulang sa implementasyon," Poe said.—LDF, GMA Integrated News