The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) says a total of 95.7 million SIM cards being used by subscribers were not properly registered.

Speaking on Tuesday at a regional sensitisation workshop that held in Port Harcourt, Rivers state, NCC officials said the agency will send the owners of the SIM cards back to registration centres for recapturing.

According to Sunday Dare, NCC’s executive commissioner for stakeholder management, who was represented by Efosa Idehen, director for compliance monitoring and enforcement, perpetrators of fraudulently registered SIM cards will be charged with felony and risk a 25-year jail term.

Of the total 151.4 million subscribers registered, only 55.7 million are valid.“A total of 151,449,837 registration data of subscribers have been processed, with only 55,749,652 records valid, making 63.2 per cent of the total records invalid based on invalid face capturing and fingerprints”, thereby underscoring the importance of proper SIM registration,” Idehen said.

The NCC director said the agency has put various sanctions in place to deal with the menace of pre-registered SIMs.

He said sanctions will extend to the head of marketing of mobile network operators and even the chief executives of licensees who illegally benefit from such illegal SIM registration activities to meet their marketing targets,“The NCC will begin to plead national security and national interests against anybody found culpable of fraudulently-registered SIM cards in the telecom industry,” he said