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Politician Says Safaricom Insider to Blame for SIM Swap Mobile Money Fraud

By Eric Priezkalns
Digital Money
Somebody sent SMS and Whatsapp messages from the account of former Kenyan Deputy President candidate Justina Wamae.

Safaricom, the market-leading telco in Kenya, has been buffeted by criticism that it is too easy for criminals to execute a SIM swap and steal from the victim’s M-PESA mobile money account. When a business is already fighting off enormous lawsuits it does not help to have a prominent politician wade in by claiming their personal account was hijacked. Justina Wamae stood as the Deputy President running mate of Roots Party Presidential candidate George Wajackoyah in Kenya’s 2022 general election. Earlier this month Wamae took to Twitter to warn followers that somebody else was using her account to ask for transfers of mobile money.

Initially Wamae reported that she was being impersonated on Whatsapp, with followers told to send money to the account of somebody called Jedidah Runanu.

Two hours later Wamae tweeted that her phone account was also being used to send bogus SMS messages, asking for money to be transferred to an M-PESA wallet in the name of Leah Muyundo.

Wamae soon regained control of her Safaricom account, but not before somebody was duped into transferring KES10,000 (USD71), an amount that was later reimbursed. Though there is no proof, Wamae suggested that her account could not have been taken over without the help of Safaricom staff.

Wamae is a fringe politician who has yet to win any important electoral contest. She stood in the general election on a Roots Party platform which combines legalization of cannabis with broadly communist and protectionist economic policies, such as deporting ‘idle foreigners’, reducing the working week to four days, and ‘hanging the corrupt’. She and Wajackoyah scored just 61,969 votes, less than 0.5 percent of the total cast. However, it harms big businesses like Safaricom to be portrayed as facilitating theft. Wamae may never obtain high office, but repeated stories of criminal activities like these will chip away at the reputation of comms providers like Safaricom. This then encourages governments and regulators to impose new compliance burdens when businesses cannot proactively demonstrate that they are protecting their customers from crime.

Eric Priezkalns
Eric Priezkalnshttp://revenueprotect.com

During his career, Eric has been a Director of Risk Management for a national telco, the Chief Executive of the Risk & Assurance Group, a Chief Marketing Officer for a software business, a consultant, a public speaker and the publisher of Commsrisk since its launch in 2006. Look here for more about the history of Commsrisk and the role played by Eric.

The comms providers that Eric has worked for include Qatar Telecom, Cable & Wireless, T‑Mobile, Sky and Worldcom. In addition to his proficiency at speaking about the current scamdemic, Eric is also a qualified chartered accountant and a subject matter expert in consumer protection, enterprise risk management, fraud prevention, data integrity and billing accuracy. Eric was the lead author of Revenue Assurance: Expert Opinions for Communications Providers, published by CRC Press. He can be reached through the contact form on this website.

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