UAE Phone Users Told ‘Not To Panic’ About SIM Registration Deadline

Mobile telephone companies have urged customers not to panic over the latest re-registration of SIM cards deadline which falls on Thursday.

The ‘My Number, My Identity’ campaign was ordered by the Telecom Regulatory Authority TRA and could take months to complete. The Thursday deadline is only for a small fraction of mobile telephone users – all of whom will have received several SMS messages in the last two weeks reminding them to go to a du or Etisalat shop with their passport and ID card to complete the mandatory process.

Director of du’s Premium Personal Market, Yasser Al Yousuf told 7DAYS: “It’s not all customers who are affected. Selected customers who we have communicated with through SMS are affected.

“From the beginning, the agreement with TRA was that we would split our database into batches and each batch will have a deadline.” Du has seven batches for its customers and Thursday’s deadline is only for the first two batches.

Al Yousuf added: “The customers in these batches will have been notified and given a reminder within the last two weeks if they haven’t registered.

“We already have three million customers who have complied with this because they have come to register voluntarily or they have been sent an SMS message, or they are new customers who we have ensured have provided the right documents.”

What happens is we have a process where if, by the end of the 17th the customer has not registered and he is part of the affected batches, his outgoing calls will be barred, so he will not be able to make calls. However, his line will still be active and he will have 90 days to come and do the registration before his line is disconnected totally.

“Now we are fairly comfortable that most of the affected customers have already registered. Because for the last month, and especially in the last two weeks we have been sending SMSs. The traffic in our shops started getting busier in the last two weeks.

“Definitely there will be people who come on Thursday and who come the minute they see they cannot make calls, but our sales teams are ready.

“I would like to remind customers that they can go to any du shop or any of our partners that sell du services to register their SIM card so they don’t have to queue in du shops only.” Al Yousuf said that the next batch of numbers that need to be registered will be contacted soon – with each batch having three months.

He added that the TRA re-registration order was for security reasons. He said: “It is purely for the interests of the customer because with phones now being a tool to access your bank account, to do a lot of money transactions, it can have a lot of applications where fraud can be involved. So, the TRA, to ensure that the customer is protected, the customer has registered and agrees that this line belongs to him – because what happened is a lot of customers did transfer or selling of numbers and lines which we don’t encourage without changing the ownership officially.

“This is to ensure that all of these processes are done properly and that people don’t get numbers under their name and give them to others who may misuse them and could even get into legal actions against the owners of the line.”

The Ministry of the Interior in Abu Dhabi predicted last week that 75% of all cybercrime in 2013 would target mobile telephones. Du and Etisalat are extending their shop hours during the next few days, some of them until midnight.

Al Yousuf added: “The message to the customer is that if you haven’t received an SMS telling you to come and register by the 17th then you can do it later. If a person for any reason is part of the batch and for any reason has not re-registered his line will be re-activated for him when he completes the form.”

Etisalat was advising only customers with the SMS message to re-register. Customer services advisers were saying: “Those who haven’t received the SMS but are unsure can call 101 to ensure about the status of their number – they will tell you whether the system requires you to re-register.”

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