Why the Real Infrastructure at Risk Is Not
the Network, It Is the Trust Built on Top of It
Every day, millions of Africans conduct their entire financial lives through a phone number. That act of faith is now under threat — and the industry has been slow to name why. This paper makes two arguments: that trust, not network uptime, is the real infrastructure at risk, and that SIM swap — Africa's most damaging and persistent fraud problem — has been fundamentally misclassified. Operators treating it as a fraud problem are solving for the wrong thing. The lock is broken.