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Saturday, October 02, 2004
.5M cellphones stolen nationwide yearly: group
EVERY year, more than half a million or 500,700 cellular phones have been stolen nationwide, based on research conducted by a private organization.
Jun Lozada, president of the Organisasyon ng mga Galit Sa Magnanakaw (OGSM) said that in 2003, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) recorded 25,380 incidents of cellphone snatching, robbery and theft.
However, this figure is just five percent of the actual numbers of cellphone theft since many of the victims refused to report to the police.
Lozada presented the research results during a Senate inquiry Friday conducted by the committee on public order and illegal drugs and committee on trade and commerce on the increasing number of cellphone theft.
But the PNP presented different figures showing that cases of cellphone theft and robbery are not that alarming.
Wilfredo Dulay, PNP deputy director for directorate for investigation and detective management said 248 cases have been recorded so far. He said this represents a 14.49 percent decrease from last year's incidents recorded from January to September.
Sen. Manuel Villar, chairman of the public order committee, asked why the PNP's records differed from the NTC records.
"It's not that konti lang ang nawalan (only a few people lost their cellphones), people are not reporting the incidents to the police," Dulay said.
The committee has asked the PNP to present more comprehensive documents in the next hearing so that the Senate could draft better laws on this problem.
Meanwhile, the OGSM has urged the Senate to draft better laws, one of which would ask telecommunication companies to come up with a master-list of cellphones so that the owners would be given protection.
He suggested that the serial number of every mobile phone they sell should be recorded by the network for easy recovery and that it cannot be used again if it gets stolen.
Villar, on the other hand, asked the cooperation of the police and telecommunications companies on how to stop the selling of stolen mobile phones in malls. JPM
(October 2, 2004 issue)
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