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40% use devices without password as 19% face online scams
The World Bank has alerted that 23 per cent of mobile phone owners have SIM cards in their phones that are registered in others’ names.The bank, which said this challenge is largely specific to low- and middle-income economies, said there are several reasons why people’s mobile phones have SIM cards registered to someone else.
According to the World Bank, in some cases, people may use phones they purchased second-hand or phones handed down to them from family members or friends whose SIM cards they never replaced. In other cases, it said one family or community member may travel to a nearby city to buy multiple SIM cards on behalf of others and then distribute them.
The World Bank added that in some economies in sub-Saharan Africa, adults report a lack of identification as a barrier to purchasing a SIM card or a mobile phone, an issue that points to secondary disparities in income and by gender.
On the flip side, the Bank said a small share of adults around the world experience the opposite dynamic: they have SIM cards in their names but do not own a mobile phone. It said this lets them use a household mobile phone or borrow another person’s mobile phone and swap in their own SIM card.
According to it, this is not a widespread practice. However, in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the regions where this is most common, only two per cent of adults have.
Indeed, in ‘The Global 2025 Findex Database: Connectivity and Financial Inclusion in the Digital Economy Study’, the World Bank said a SIM card is necessary for using a mobile phone to do almost anything, stressing that SIM cards identify a mobile phone to a mobile network and often store information about the phone’s owner.
According to it, in many economies, purchasers need some form of identification to buy a SIM card from a mobile network operator, and certain digital services typically require that the SIM card in the phone of the person using the service be registered in that user’s name.
It revealed that they may use customers’ SIM card numbers as network IDs to verify the identity of account owners when they make instant payments or apply for credit.
The World Bank noted that in African economies such as the Comoros, the Republic of Congo, Morocco and Tanzania, as well as in Jordan and Nepal, the share of mobile phone owners whose phones do not have a SIM card registered in their name exceeds 40 per cent.
The study revealed that women who own mobile phones are as likely as men who own mobile phones to have SIM cards in their names in East Asia and the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean.
It observed that all other regions showed fewer women than men owning mobile phones with SIM cards in their names, but the difference is smallest in SSA, at five percentage points. In Europe and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa and South Asia, the difference is at least 20 percentage points.
The World Bank further revealed that while 40 per cent of phone users have no password, about 15 per cent of all adults in low- and middle-income economies, and 19 per cent of mobile phone owners, say that someone else sets rules about when and how they use their devices.
According to the bank, that share is about five percentage points higher in East Asia and the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean. In the Middle East and North Africa, women phone owners are twice as likely as men with phones to be subject to someone else’s rules about their phone use.
The bank revealed that young adults between the ages of 15 and 25 are generally more likely than those in other age groups to say that rules for mobile phone use are imposed on them. It noted that in Europe and Central Asia, younger adults with phones are 18 percentage points more likely than older adults to have rules imposed on them regarding phone use. In Latin America and the Caribbean, in contrast, younger and older adults are equally likely to have rules imposed on them.
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