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Fake mobile phones dominate African market –SON

By on August 10, 2014

The Director-General of the Standards Organisation of Nigeria, Dr. Joseph Odumodu, has said that about 80 per cent of mobile phones at the said largest technology market in Africa (Computer Village in Lagos) are fake products.

Odumodu said officials of SON discovered this after series of investigations and surveys.

He said the findings showed that the larger percentage of sales from brands including Hewlett Packard, Nokia, Samsung, and others, were not coming from their manufacturers directly but through counterfeiting.

The SON DG made this disclosure when asked on the organisation’s contribution to the ongoing war being waged by Hewlett Packard against product counterfeiting in Nigeria.

He said, “Some dealers of the global brands appoint agents locally that engaged in counterfeiting, by so doing, doing more damage to the brands and the market.”

According to him, people make more money by copying; becoming more powerful than the owners.

He said, “This is the battle we are currently fighting as an agency and we shall win the fight.

“Already, the one week deadline we gave to dealers of fake phones, computers and other accessories in Computer Village has expired and we shall storm there again in no time for a final cleansing.”

The District Manager, English Africa, Printing and Personal Systems, HP, Jean-Paul Pinto, had earlier told our correspondent that though new style of Information Technology is emerging in mobility; cloud, social and big data, counterfeiting has remained a major threat.

Pinto, who said Africa is important to HP not only because of the money, but also to impact lives with technology, disclosed that the Nigerian market accounts for 20 per cent of HP’s sales globally.

He said, “HP sells two Personal Computers and one printer every minute in Africa, with major sales coming from Nigeria, reason we know that if we succeed in tackling counterfeits in Nigeria, we can equally succeed in other part of the continent.”

Lead Investigation for HP Anti-counterfeiting Programme for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Geofrey Eyles, said counterfeiting feeds from huge investments of businessmen and women. “So, everyone must collaborate against these rings in other to protect the economy,” he said.

He added, “All international crimes are a local crime somewhere. So, there is need for global approach to fight counterfeiting.”

Only recently, Reuters had reported that security researchers have revealed two separate threats that could put up to 90 per cent of the world’s two billion plus smartphones at risk of password theft, stolen data and in some cases let hackers take full control of devices.

According to analysts, if users of genuine smartphones can be at risk, those with fake mobile phones are fully at risk.

The Reuters report entitled, ‘Smartphone management flaws puts users at risk,’ which was published on July 31, said that one vulnerability involved flaws in the way scores of manufacturers of Apple, Google Android and Blackberry devices, among others, have implemented an obscure industry standard that controls how everything from network connections to user identities are managed.

The threat could enable attackers to remotely wipe devices, install malicious software, access data and run applications on smartphones, Mathew Solnik, a mobile researcher with Denver-based cyber security firm Accuvant, said in a phone interview.

A separate threat specifically affecting up to three-quarters of devices running older Android software has been unearthed by researchers at Bluebox Security of San Francisco. Dubbed “Fake ID”, the vulnerability allows malicious applications to trick trusted software from Adobe, Google and others on Android devices without any user notification, the company said on Wednesday.

“Essentially anything that relies on verified signature chains of an Android application is undermined by this vulnerability,” Bluebox said in a statement referring to devices built before Google updated its core software late last year.

These risks could not be independently verified by Reuters.

 

[Punch]