TELECOMMUNICATION FRAUD PREVENTION POLICIES AND IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGE

Sammanfattning: The telecommunication system has being one of the greatest inventions of man. Ever since its introduction, it has grown to become the backbone of development and a platform for good governance for most countries throughout the world. Sadly, this good invention of man was never designed with its security or the security of its services in mind [22]. Despite the importance of telecommunication, and the existence of telecommunication systems for so many years, telecommunication system security are neither well understood nor managed effectively [22]. After several years of telecommunication system existence, security concerns are becoming a threat to its existence and operations.  All countries have policies regulating telecommunication operations as well as policies to ensure sanity in the use of telecommunication platforms to the benefit of their societies, governments and the telecom operators. The challenge however, is how efficient and effective these policies are implemented. These challenges, create room for criminals to commit fraud using telecom platforms by exploiting the weaknesses in either the policies or the lack of will to implement the policies by regulators. This thesis used field research method to examine the existing telecommunication fraud prevention policies, the current challenges in implementing these policies and the existing telecom frauds. Using the country Ghana as a case study, the current challenges were broadly placed into three (3) categories as follows: (a) regulators challenges, (b) operators challenges and (c) User/subscriber challenges. Unlike findings of previous studies, the research found that: (i) inefficient telecommunication fraud prevention policies, (ii) the quest to earn high revenue in international termination fees to sustain the economy and telecom operations and (iii) lack of proper coordination and cooperation between implementation agencies, are the new challenges which were not previously stated as challenges to the implementations of telecommunication fraud prevention policies. This does not discount the fact that some of the previously revealed challenges persist. The research findings are used to generalised for other developing countries with features similar to Ghana especially sub-Sahara African countries. And also, all the recommendations are applicable as well.