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Mobile Money Transfers On Con Hit List(AllAfrica Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Just as the season's festivities were coming to an end as the New Year beckoned, Andrew Muchira, who was taking a rest at home received a text message -- nothing out of the ordinary, he would have thought. Bit then it was a message supposedly from M-Pesa telling him that he had received Sh8,000 from a certain Mr Waititu. Besides the fact that he did not know anyone by that name, what peeked his interest, was his 'new' balance. It was Sh8,000, yet he recalled transacting with his M-Pesa account the previous day and leaving a balance of Sh2,000. It should read Sh10,000, he thought, then became suspicious -- he was being conned, he concluded and decided to play along with the conman. He called Mr Waititu and informed him that he had sent the money to the wrong number. "On receiving my call, the man sounded so frantic and seemed almost ready to cry, pleading with me to send the money because it was meant for his brother who was in hospital in Eldoret. He said the brother needed the money so that he could be discharged from the hospital and urged me to deduct Sh300 in repayment for my honesty," says Mr Muchira. "I agreed to send back the money but instead informed Safaricom of the issue and was referred to another number where I gave out the details. The conman called me another five times before I got tired of receiving his calls and ignored the sixth one. Each time he called I would tell him I was sending the money. I even asked him to forward the number of his brother so that I could send it directly. He sent a number, which I also forwarded to Safaricom. It seems it finally dawned on the man that I was playing with him and he stopped calling," says Mr Muchira. In yet another case, Mr Samson Tumuka got an "M-Pesa" alert that he had received Sh10,000 from a certain Emmanuel. He didn't know the man and immediately thought he had sent the money to the wrong number. He called him back and a very distressed voice from the man told him he was sending the money to his sister in Mombasa to pay the remaining school fees for his daughter. Mr Tumuka reassured him that he would get his money back and immediately went to his M-Pesa account to send it. "I got an M-Pesa reply that I didn't have sufficient funds in my account. I checked my balance and found that I had zero balance. I thought the man had called Safaricom and reversed the transaction, so I called him but he said he had not received the money and that he was going to call the operator to find out." A few minutes later, the said man called him saying he was calling from Safaricom customer care and that they were trying to reverse the transaction but had encountered a problem, as the transaction had hang and needed a key in code so that he could get the money. "After checking the number he was calling on again, I realised it was a private number and not a Safaricom customer care number. I hang up the phone and went back to look at the original M-Pesa alert, which stated that I had received Sh10,000. To my surprise I had not noticed that the message, though a very authentic looking M-Pesa message, had actually not been sent from the regular M-Pesa address," he says. These two cases are not unique. A number of subscribers are losing money through mobile money transfers in schemes that operators are now working overtime to deal with. The fraudsters are taking advantage of unsuspecting subscribers by sending false transfers and calling up almost immediately to claim back the money. "These people create a text message indicating your have received some money and new balance and call you up immediately to request for a reversal. If you are not careful, you automatically send back the money to them," says Ms Waceke Mbugua, M-Pesa marketing manager at Safaricom Limited. "With basic phone programming it is possible to label a number with whatever name, including M-Pesa, to hoodwink the message recipient. This is just the tip of the iceberg," says Sam Wambugu a financial advisor. "Many more tricks are on the way as skills in mobile phone programming becomes widespread." In a bid to pull the wool off victim's eyes fraudsters have mastered the art of using human psychology -- the plea of money sent mistakenly is always accompanied by a distress situation. Most of them, according to Ms Mbugua, will invoke the intentions of having meant to send the money to a sick relative or for use at funeral. "Clearly if someone presents such a case you automatically reverse the perceived transfer because issues to do with death and sickness are attached to emotions," she says. On target are amounts ranging from Sh1,000 to Sh5,000 but on the extreme some defraud as much as Sh20,000. Even signed up agents are not spared this scum as many continue to complain of being targets. Some customers like Mr Tumuka have been lucky to escape because of lack of funds in their accounts. While fraudsters seem to pounce randomly, up-market areas have become a thriving ground where high-income earners deposit large sums of money on their mobile phone accounts. While the latest acts of fraud on mobile money transfers seem to have caught the attention of operators, the actors behind it have been on it for sometime. Soon after the launch of M-Pesa in 2007, it received an overwhelming acceptance from Kenyans. It is this wave that saw a number of trick promotional short message services do rounds on the network. This was further buttressed by hoax calls from people claiming to be the operator's employees alerting subscribers of having won a competition. Interestingly, most of these calls and many more that in some instances threatened victims who did not transfer money to the mobile numbers they specified, originated from maximum security prisons. The Communications Commission of Kenya requirement to register all mobile phone subscribers in the country is believed to have put a lid on this kind of scam to some extent. "In such cases, we warn our subscribers not to send money or indulge such people purporting to call from Airtel claiming to offer them prizes," says Mr Rene Meza, CEO Airtel. Even with these cases on the rise, few people who have been conned are coming out to report the cases. This is believed to be due to fear of being ridiculed, especially by friends and family causing more silence. Cases reported to law enforcers too have made little headway since there are no specific laws in Kenya to deal with such crime. Kenya in 2009 adopted a law addressing e-transactions, e-signatures, consumer protection, and computer crime. This, however, does not meet the threshold of dealing with crimes related to mobile money transfers. The ever-mutating tricks were also at one point a target of subscribers who were not keen on keeping their Personal Identification Numbers (PIN) top secret. However, a sustained campaign by service providers seems to have paid off to this end. "Pin cases have gone down since we started the campaign but we still have cases of agents defrauding customers who still issue out their PIN to them during transactions," says Ms Mbugua. In a bid to counter the fast evolving tricks by fraudsters, Safaricom specifically, has started a fraud education for its subscribers. The firm is currently conducting such education through the broadcast media, especially in vernacular for a wider reach. "The problem is wide spread and we have to come to the subscribers and let them know that this is happening and we are working on it. Safaricom is doing its best to educate M-Pesa subscribers on the do's and don'ts of the services," says Ms Waceke Mbugua, M-Pesa marketing manager at Safaricom Limited. "We are cautioning our customers through these campaigns and making them aware of what they should do incase such tricks are pulled on them," Ms Mbugua said. The company is also issuing out new transaction log books to agents who do not have the customer mobile phone number listed. "The rule of the thumb is to respond to stranger calls and messages with caution. The fact that a message comes purporting to be from M-Pesa because it is so labelled or any other service for that matter, does not make it credible. Techie crooks are on loose," warns Mr Wambugu. Copyright The Nation. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). |