On September 5, 2022, House Bill 14, a unified bill requiring the registration of SIM cards, was accepted by the House Committee on Information and Communications Technology.
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Toby Tiangco, a representative for Navotas and the panel’s head, gave his blessing to a reintroduced and unified measure that would mandate the registration of all postpaid and prepaid Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card users.
The registration process currently only accepts postpaid SIM cards.
Speaker Martin Romualdez introduced House Bill 14, the same as the version passed by the 18th Congress. However, President Rodrigo Duterte vetoed it, saying that the issue needed a more “thorough study” and that the original bill did not require social media companies to register with the government.
Speaker Martin Romualdez
According to Romualdez’s explanatory note, “Due to the lack of SIM card regulation in the country, it becomes nearly impossible to trace the persons behind the text scams and hold them accountable for fraud, breach of data privacy or other punishable offenses that they committed using an unknown mobile number,”
A Senate Services Committee hearing on the rise of SMS fraud is schedule for September 8, 2022.
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