The Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications has urged the public to be cautious of persons posing as staff of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) to steal monies from mobile money accounts of users following the roll out of the Electronic Transfer Levy (E-Levy).

The implementation of the new 1.5% value tax which took effect last week has been fraught with a number of challenges including the non-application of some exemptions from the tax.

Some social media users have for instance complained about the fact that transfers on the same or different networks or banks owned by the same user are attracting the tax, although they are not meant to.

The Telecommunications Chamber is worried that some persons are taking advantage of the situation to call Mobile Money (MoMo) users under the guise of assisting them to reverse a wrongful deduction, and end up withdrawing monies of those who fall prey.

“There is no reversal that starts with the entity calling you. The entities are the ones supposed to do the refunds. anytime someone calls you trying to engage you on reversal of E-levy and that he or she is from Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), just cut the call and report to your entity because GRA does not involve itself with reversals”, says the Chief Executive Officer of the Chamber, Dr. Ken Ashigbey

The government, together with the entities facilitating the implementation, have put in place mechanisms to correct exempted transactions that have so far been affected in the modified phased implementation of the levy.

Dr. Ashigbey says steps are being taken to check the operations of the fraudsters.

“If you send money and you are wrongfully deducted, you would have to place the call to begin the reversal process. So it is important that we are all cautious so that no one plays on our intelligence and defraud us of our hard-earned money.”