Phone snatchers team up to wreak havoc on Kano residents

Internet hackers and mobile phone snatchers in Kano State have begun an unholy alliance to wreak more havoc on their victims in the nation’s commercial centre.

Many residents who have had encounters with phone snatchers in the city recently, decry how the frightful encounters left them more impoverished.

This is so because phone snatchers now sell the SIM cards from stolen phones to internet hackers, who in turn gain access into victims’ bank accounts linked to the SIM cards and steal from their savings.

Phone snatching in Kano has recently taken on a more daring and violent approach with youths operating as a mob, blockig motorists, snatching their phones and sometimes stealing from commuters in broad daylight; a development that has left many victims with injuries, some fatal.

This is despite the effort of the police to rid the city of crime with the arrest of hundreds of thugs (locally known as Yan Daba) in the first half of 2021 alone.

But while the police in the state maintain that cases of phone theft have reduced “drastically” due to the counter-measures the command deployed, residents insist the thugs, in alliance with internet hackers, are still unleashing mayhem on them as the coalition now costs them more than just their stolen mobile phones.

It was gathered that the hackers gain access into their victims’ accounts by requesting for the Bank Verification Number (BVN) from the bank through the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) which then allows them to carry out several transactions or use the SIM cards to buy huge airtime from the bank that is linked to the SIM.

Kano Chronicle learnt that some of the snatchers, who are “kind”, sometimes offer to sell the SIM cards to their victims before bolting with the phones.

Hajiya Umma Hassan of Sabuwar Gandu area is one of the several residents whose bank accounts were compromised using their SIM cards a few hours after their phones were stolen.

Another victim, Amina Salisu, a resident of Tudun Murtala area of the city, shared her ordeal.

She said, “They stole four phones, including my son’s computer. Prior to that night, my husband, who had travelled, sent N192,000 into my son’s account for foodstuff and school fees of our children. In the morning when my son went to the bank to withdraw the money he found out that the money was not there. As he complained to the bank they confirmed the withdrawal around 6.am.”

A staff of Fantel Telecommunication Company, one of the agents of a top telecommunication network provider in Kano, told our reporter that there was a man that approached them recently with a complaint that his phone was stolen and that hackers used his SIM card to buy airtime of N140,000 from his bank account based on information from the bank.

Expert suggests ways to curb trend

Sharif Abbas, a network provider agent at Fantel, who confirmed that similar complaints were received from many customers, urged the residents to be more vigilant and the security agencies to tackle the hackers and snatchers’ coalition head-on.

According to him, mobile service providers already put in place durable solutions to safeguard SIM cards, which include using Personal Identification Number (PIN) to lock SIM cards the same way people use password to lock their mobile phones.

Accvording to him, when a user buys a new SIM card, it comes with a default PIN of four zeroes which should be changed immediately to any number that suits and can be easily remembered by the user.

Abbas also advised that banks should take actions to prevent such occurrence, suggesting that it should be mandated by banks for a “customer” to provide the PIN attached to the account as verification before the it authorises any USSD transaction.

When contacted, the police spokesman in Kano, DSP Abdullahi Haruna Kiyawa, said the police had been and would continue to make concerted effort to address every issue that had to do with phone snatching and any other criminality in the state.

He said the command recently arrested not less than 95 suspected thugs who were mostly involved in phone snatching and recovered 34 mobile phones and other items.

Muhammad Sulaiman