The Minister-Designate for Communications, Samuel Nartey George (Sam George), has raised concerns over the growing menace of online impersonation, warning the public against fraudulent schemes using fake social media accounts.
Addressing Parliament today, Sam George revealed that he personally dealt with a case earlier in the day where an impersonator was using his identity to offer fake immigration jobs. He cautioned Ghanaians to remain vigilant. He stated that no Member of Parliament or Minister of State would ever reach out on social media to offer jobs.
Sam George stated, “I want to believe everybody in this House—the 275 members in this House have suffered an issue of impersonation online. either with a fake Facebook account or a fake TikTok account or Twitter account. In fact, just this morning, I had to deal with a case of someone impersonating me and offering immigration jobs.”
“Mr. Speaker, let’s use this opportunity to state emphatically to the people of Ghana that no member of Parliament or Minister of State will reach out to you on social media to offer you a job. Any such approach is a scam,” he emphasized.
Sam George further called for enhanced public sensitization on cybersecurity threats. He also revealed ongoing efforts to collaborate with at least an ECOWAS framework or an AU framework that will then compel meta.
“it’s one thing, Ghana, as a country, speaking to Meta, as a multinational, that’s worth trillions of dollars. It’s a different thing when Africa is speaking as a collective voice. Because Europe, even as a continent, doesn’t deal with these tech platforms as individual countries. The GDPR is a Europe-wide regulation that has the weight of all European countries backing it.
And so we need to have at least an ECOWAS framework or an AU framework that will then compel meta.”
”Because, Mr. Speaker, even if you were to issue a summons for Meta to appear before this Parliament’s Committee on Communications, I doubt that you’ll be able to summon anybody to appear before this committee… You don’t have meta appearing before individual EU countries. But if we do this as collectively, I believe we’ll be able to push it.”
