The measure we wrote about two weeks ago — prepaid SIM cards activated only on the basis of an identity document — has climbed another step. On 26 June, Parliament passed in first reading the draft amendment to the Law on electronic communications, according to Parliament’s statement.
One thing to make clear at the outset: it is not yet law. The Government had approved the measure on 17 June, as an executive decision; it has now passed first reading in Parliament, a second reading follows — with possible amendments — and only after final adoption and publication in the Official Gazette does a one-year countdown to entry into force begin. So the anonymity of the prepaid card does not vanish tomorrow.
What the adopted text actually brings
Compared with the Government’s announcement, the parliamentary version clarifies the mechanics. At activation, the citizen will provide their name, surname and IDNP, verified through the «State Population Register» information system; foreigners will present a document issued by their home state, and the provider will keep a copy. Identification can be done at the point of sale, online, by mobile signature or other digital means.
There is also an intermediate stage: until identified, the card may be used only for essential services — 112 emergency calls and access to the identification portal. And the identification data will be kept for the whole duration of the service and another 12 months after it ends, so it can be consulted in any investigations. The rule applies only to numbers activated after entry into force; cards already active are not re-registered.
How big is the phenomenon
The authorities’ argument rests on figures. According to the data cited in Parliament, almost 1.6 million prepaid SIM cards are active in the Republic of Moldova — 42.7% of all mobile connections. It is precisely their anonymity, the initiators say, that is exploited in fraud, scams and false calls.
One statistic is hard to overlook: in 2025 there were 1,190 false bomb alerts and abusive calls to emergency services, and because of the difficulty in identifying the authors, according to Parliament’s statement, only one in 29 such cases reached court. The scale of losses from phone and online scams — in the hundreds of millions of lei — we detailed in our previous article.
Where it lands in Ungheni: the border
This is the difference from the first story. Beyond the scams that hit the elderly, Parliament’s statement invokes a second use of anonymous cards: cross-border smuggling. Prepaid cards, Parliament writes, are also used in smuggling, including for the remote control of drones via mobile networks — 129 such incidents documented over the past five years.
For a district like Ungheni, this is no abstraction. Ungheni is the gateway district on the Prut border: here is the Sculeni road crossing, one of the busiest in the country; here is the only international railway linking Moldova to Romania, with the gauge change at Ungheni station; here too, in the town, are the headquarters of the Border Police’s West Regional Directorate and the Centre of Excellence in Border Security — the country’s only border-guard school. And across the Prut, the new road bridge to Zagarancea is being built.
In Ungheni, the most verifiable thread is not the drone but the card. In February 2022, at Petrești — a Prut village in the district — officers documented the movement of 30,000 cigarettes across the river by inflatable boat; in the searches that followed, according to the Border Police, mobile phones and SIM cards were among the items seized. More recently, a joint Moldova–Romania operation concluded in 2026 targeted a smuggling network active mainly in the Fălești and Ungheni districts, in which phones and GPS devices were confiscated, while at the Sculeni customs post over 5.5 million cigarettes were seized in February 2026. In other words, the very «ecosystem» of anonymous communication the law targets has already shown up, in several cases, right at the district’s border.
A note of honesty: the cases involving drones used in smuggling across the Prut that have become public concern the northern stretch of the river, not the Ungheni area. Here, the tangible evidence remains the phones and cards seized in the cigarette cases.
The other side: operators and lawyers
The bill is not met with unanimous applause. The telecom operators, through the ICT companies’ association (ATIC) — which groups Moldtelecom, Moldcell and Orange Moldova — declared themselves against it, citing the lack of studies showing that such an obligation actually reduces crime.
Objections have come from within the state too. In their opinions on the bill, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Justice Ministry flagged that the text is not accompanied by minimum security standards and sufficient safeguards for the protection of personal data — a risk, they say, that the measure will be perceived as a regime of generalized identification, in tension with the right to privacy. The Interior Ministry, the initiator, rejects the criticism and maintains that this data-protection framework is already in place, and that access concerns only identification data, not the content of conversations or location. (The positions are reported by RFE/RL; the operators’ own documents and those of the data-protection authority remain to be obtained from source.)
Does it actually work?
The underlying question — does card identification cut crime — has no simple answer. On one hand, identifying prepaid cards is the rule across most of Europe: according to a Cullen International analysis, 19 of 28 European countries studied require it. On the other, the negative examples exist too. In Romania, the Constitutional Court twice struck down similar laws, in 2014 and 2019, on grounds of breaching privacy — a failure the Moldovan version tries to avoid (without retroactively re-registering old cards). And Mexico scrapped its card registry after the database was breached, without crime having fallen.
The conclusion remains the one from the previous article: card identification is a step, not a complete solution. More and more calls come from abroad, over the internet, with spoofed numbers a Moldovan rule cannot touch — while on the other side stands the legitimate question of how the data of 1.6 million people will be protected.
The next step, and a missing figure
The bill goes to a second reading, where the debate over amendments will play out — including over the one-year term, considered by some too long, by others enough. And exactly how often anonymous cards turn up in fraud and smuggling cases in the Ungheni district remains a figure the authorities release only at national level; there is, for now, no public breakdown for the district.
The legislative stage and the content of the bill come from the statement of the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova (first reading, 26 June 2026) and from the Government’s statement (17 June 2026). The smuggling cases and the district’s border infrastructure come from statements by the Border Police and the Customs Service. The objections of the operators (via ATIC), the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Justice Ministry are reported by RFE/RL Moldova; the European comparative context belongs to a Cullen International analysis. The figures on the number of prepaid cards, false alerts and smuggling incidents are those cited by the initiators in Parliament.