A young pretty lady called Afua (for the sake of this story) dressed up one fine morning to Scancom Ltd. (Areeba) Osu offices in Accra to have her General Package Radio Service (GPRS) Multi Media Messaging System (MMS) configured. Little did she know that one of the Areeba workers (name withheld for now) was going to skip through her personal and confidential pictures file, select and pick her nude pictures.

The Crusading Guide can confirm that Afua’s nude pictures ended up on the phone of the Areeba worker who fixed her GPRS. The worker did not tell Afua about the fact that he had selected some of her nude pictures unto her phone until Afua discovered it at home that fateful day.

Afua was going through her “sent messages” box when she discovered that picture messages had been sent from her phone to a particular number. “I was shocked that my nude pictures had been sent out, especially when I knew that I haven’t sent the pictures to anybody, so I decided to call the number my nude pictures had been sent to only to discover that it was the number of the guy who fixed the GPRS/MMS. “When I asked him why he did that, he started apologizing and begging me to forgive him and that he did not know what he was doing.

I was so shocked that I cut the line and started crying”, Afua said. She further said that the Areeba staff called on her phone again apologising profusely. According to her, she was so angry she dropped the phone at the sitting room and left for the bedroom to sleep. “So when the Areeba guy was ringing my phone, my mum picked it up and he spoke to her to beg me. My mother was very angry with him.

“He called for the second time and my uncle picked it and he told my uncle to plead with me to forgive him for what he had done. My uncle told him that in recent times because several nude pictures were doing the rounds in the country’s university campuses and other places, it was unfair for the guy to have done what he did.” According to her, later that day, the Areeba worker fell on a friend to beg her. A cross- check by this paper confirmed that Afua had been prevailed upon by the erring staff’s colleague to drop the matter. Afua’s uncle and mum have all confirmed having spoken to the Areeba worker on the matter.

When a questionnaire was sent to Areeba on the matter through its Public Relations (PR) boss, Mr. Alex Abbiew, he refused to comment, saying that the matter was being discussed with the lawyers of Afua. The Crusading Guide has it that a two week ultimatum given by Afua’s lawyers to react to the matter was treated with contempt and instead, the Areeba legal team replied to the letter after the two-week ultimatum had elapsed.

In a later reaction to Afua’s lawyers responses, the Areeba legal team, headed by Ms. Pala C. Kwawukume, said that though the Areeba staff came across the nude pictures and sent them to his phone, he did not view them but rather deleted them immediately they came on to his phone.

The team argued that the working condition in Areeba was so tight that their employee couldn’t have viewed the nude pictures. Areeba, a multinational company, is the leading GSM service provider in Ghana. It has over two million customers in the country and millions outside Ghana. Meanwhile, Areeba has given Afua a Motorolla Razor phone worth $300 for what they claimed was to show their appreciation for Afua as their customer.