In its effort to eradicate false registration on prepaid telco service, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) have made some amendments to the way telco registers its prepaid customers. These amendments were announced as part of the announcement that MCMC made on 1 June 2017.
One such adjustment is that the registration has to be done at the point of purchase. While that sounds nothing out of ordinary, it has to be using secured automated platforms instead of manual registration. Among platforms that were mentioned in MCMC’s notice is Optical Character Recognition-based machine, MyKad reader, or biometrics equipment.
MCMC also noted that telco have to develop a secure method for users to obtain information regarding SIM cards that are registered under their names. Additionally, this method has to come at no costs to consumers. At the same time, MCMC has also reduced the number of maximum prepaid SIM card that customers can own from 10 to 5 per person.
The most intriguing change under the 1 June’s notice (based on our understandings) is that customers might have to provide identification numbers in order to top up their prepaid account. However, it has come to our knowledge that MCMC and telcos are still finding the best way to implement it.
Other than that, we have also learned the deadline for telcos to implement all these new changes for prepaid registration is on 1 December 2017. This means that users will not see the new changes happening immediately but it is still good to be aware of them.
(Source: MCMC)
