Joy News’ investigations have revealed that electronic roadworthy stickers procured by the Driver Vehicle and Licensing Authority (DVLA) are being faked by fraudsters known as ‘goro’ boys.
The DVLA was pushed to switch to electronic stickers due to the alarming rate at which the manual stickers were being counterfeited.
Director in charge of Vehicle Inspection and Registration, George Ackom, was confident the sophisticated features of the electronic stickers will make them difficult to reproduce without the database of the DVLA.
The Head of public affairs at the Controller and Accountant General’s Department, Robert Cudjoe had bragged that the “goro boys have been out of business,” since the introduction of the new system
This, however, is not the case, as Joy News’ Kwetey Nartey has discovered that the ‘goro’ boys are still in big business.
Instead of ₵58 for an electronic sticker, the ‘goro’ boys are counterfeiting them for a whopping ₵150 and some drivers who do not have the time go through the crippling bureaucracy at the DVLA are paying for the counterfeits.
To be sure that information available to him is accurate, Kwetey made a trip to the Weija office of the DVLA in Accra.
One of the well-known ‘goro’ boys, Francis, who operates at the office assured Kwetey he could get him a sticker without having his vehicle go through inspection.
In just three days, Francis was able to provide Kwetey with an electronic roadworthy sticker, with the assurance that it was genuine.
However, after the two-dimensional barcode scanner was run over the sticker, it came out as fake.
Meanwhile, over one million manual roadworthy stickers procured by the Controller and Accountant General’s Department have been abandoned at the DVLA stores in Accra.
The stickers, worth over ₵40 million, have been left in the stores for the past two years after the introduction of the electronic ones.
The manual stickers became useless a few weeks after the introduction of the electronic roadworthy ones. The DVLA was to phase out the old ones gradually as it introduces the new ones.
Source-myjoyonline.com
