Voter-cards-to-register-SIM-cards: STAE employee, one other arrested – Watch

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Voter-cards-to-register-SIM-cards: STAE employee, one other arrested – Watch

6:45 CAT | 23 Aug 2024

Screen grab: Miramar

The Mozambican police have arrested two people, including an employee of the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration (STAE) in Nampula, northern Mozambique, on suspicion of selling invalid voter cards for fraudulent SIM card registration.

“The other person arrested was a collaborator. He was the one who facilitated the receipt of the voter cards for sale. He acted as a bridge between the STAE employee and the Vodacom employee, who was also arrested (in May),” Sernic spokesperson Enina Tsinine told Lusa.

The arrest, on Monday, was made following a case registered in May, in the Namicopo neighbourhood, where police dismantled a network of agents fraudulently selling SIM cards and registering accounts using voter cards.

According to Sernic, the STAE employee allegedly sold duplicate cards to the network during the voter registration process and other voter cards which had been discarded due to printing errors. A total of more than 2,000 documents were seized during the search operations in May.

“The voter registration process was carried out and instead of printing one card, they printed two. It was a scheme that was already in place. Everyone knew that they could make money with the (voter) card, so they started duplicating them,” Tsinine reported, adding that, with a single voter card, “they could register over 100,000 people [SIM cards]”.

In May, Vodacom’s M-Pesa digital wallet closed down a “network of agents registering accounts and fraudulently selling SIM cards” from that Mozambican telecommunications operator in “high-risk areas”, leading to 28 arrests.

The operator, which owns the largest digital wallet in the country – whose transactions only work using mobile phones and their necessary SIM cards – said that in February it detected “the existence of a significant number of accounts opened by tampering with identification documents in the High-Risk Areas (Northern Region)”, which was followed by an “in-depth investigation process that identified [SIM card] registration agents involved in fraudulent activities”.

“The fraud was carried out through the use of a single identification document by several agents, who proceeded to create several records based on that same document,” it further explained, indicating the Namicopo and Carrupeia neighbourhoods as “the main foci of this illicit practice”.

Mozambique will hold general, presidential, legislative and provincial elections on 9 October.