In a bid to secure our smartphones from being used for fraudulent acts, there has been the development of different methods of protection such as the use of personal identification number (PIN), passwords, fingerprints, face recognition and so on.
While most people have focused on protecting their smartphones, a major and significant part of our phones, our sim cards, have been neglected. The sim card is an important component of our phones which also needs to be protected as a result of important data that has been stored on our sim cards.
The only means of protecting our sim cards is through the use of the SIM PIN. The sim pin is a 4- digits code feature designed by various telecommunications companies as a means of securing our sim cards.
Discussed in this article are the reasons you should activate your PIN.
1. To protect your identity
Your sim card is your identity as they are a widely used method for identifying phone users all over the world.
Locking a sim card protects your identity as no one can access it without knowing the various codes or having the exact biometric pattern of your fingerprint.
So, activating SIM PIN on your phone is a good way of securing your identity, especially from fraudsters who are into identity theft.
2. To protect information on your SIM cardÂ
Most of us make use of passwords, pins, finger prints, and face recognition on our phones as a means of securing information and other vital details on the phone.
What we fail to understand is that, if a person cannot access our phone as a result of the password or pin used, if they should get access to our sim card, it is as good as having access to our phone. This is because our sim cards are reservoirs of important data.
So, activate your sim pin today in order to protect vital information on your sim card.
3. To prevent unrestricted access to your privacy
If your smartphone is stolen, the thief probably just want to sell it for its value on the black market and not to make phone calls or access the internet using your voice and data plan.
However, in some cases, the thief might want to access your phone, especially if the thief is someone close to you and is directly interested in your private life. Without an active SIM PIN, he or she might be able to listen to your voice notes or read your messages.
Since, you don’t want any of these happening, it is thus important for you to activate a PIN for your SIM card.
4. To prevent fraud
Another reason you should activate your sim pin is in order to prevent fraud. With the technological advancements in today’s world, ways of doing things have become very simple for everyone, fraudsters inclusive.
There are some fraudsters who are only into defrauding people through the use of lost SIM cards.
If you use a sim pin, even if your phone is stolen, your sim card becomes useless to fraudsters because if it is inserted into a new phone, it will ask for the unlock PIN before calls can be made or received on the phone and before your data can be used.
So, making use of a sim pin helps you from getting defrauded in cases where you lose or misplace your smartphone.
5. To safeguard your bank account(s)
Your sim card is very important and should be treated with utmost care.
One thing that we fail to remember which may be the reason we treat our sim cards with less care is that those sim cards are also linked to our bank accounts.
Consequently, if someone could simply remove your unprotected SIM card and place it in their device, they can sure get access to your bank account if that was the sim you used in opening such account.
Since your bank accounts are linked to your sim card, activating the sim pin is the best thing for you to do in order to safeguard your bank account.
All SIM cards have PIN codes, but using them is optional, as you can choose to disable them. However, we do believe that you need to activate your SIM PIN since it is the only way to protect the information on your SIM card.
While you can choose to keep the default SIM PIN set by your mobile operator, it is better from a security perspective to change it to a new PIN that only you know.
