South Africa’s Operators Cooperate to Combat Crime

South Africa’s leading telecommunication operators, including MTN SA, Vodacom, Telkom SA, Cell C, and Liquid Intelligent Technologies, joined to establish a non-profit organization, the Communication Risk Information Centre (COMRiC).  

The new company seeks to better protect its network investments and advance the country’s participation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.  

As such, COMRiC‘s main focus will be on the identification, mitigation, and prevention of common risk issues within the communications industry. Not too surprisingly, the key focus will be critical infrastructure network vandalism, commercial crimes, and cyber security.  

COMRiC’s CEO Vernall Muller said: “The formation of COMRiC has enabled formal discussion and solution finding between operators to handle the risks they face. It has also created a platform through which we will engage society on issues of related crime and support government in the overall fight against crime in South Africa.”  

Muller says that over the last two years, especially, the criminal gaze has shifted to the South African telecommunications operators. The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the advent of load-shedding and related power cuts are factors that have contributed to this upsurge.  

On a different note, theft and vandalism have been considered a major issue lately, affecting the main operators and causing disruption of communication services and large financial losses. For example, some operators did not find it feasible to replace damaged base stations.  

Therefore, the formation of COMRiC allowed formal discussion and solution finding between operators to handle the risks they face and support the government in the overall fight against crime in South Africa.  

This collaboration between the country’s operators to fight theft and network infrastructure vandalism has resulted in the establishment of the Critical Infrastructure Monitoring Operations Centre (CiMOC), which operates under the CiMOC structure.  

The CiMOC will prioritize the collective monitoring of critical network infrastructure theft and vandalism across the combined network footprint of all the country’s operators.  

This includes cooperating with the police services to identify and detain suspects in-network vandalism, store robberies, battery theft, and fraudulent application scenarios, including commercial crimes.