On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 10:34, Esther Muchiri <emuchiri@andestbites.com> wrote:

Sam, thanks for bringing up the subject. It was indeed sad to see on TV the smartly dressed men walk into a shop and casually carry out their ‘activity’ without people realizing! I pray to God that they will get caught – thanks for the CCTV. However, what does this say about our society?

Recently when Safaricom was upgrading their system, some guy posing as a Safaricom agent called an MPESA agent and guided him in keying some code on his phone to complete the upgrade! What the Agent didn’t know is that by punching those keys (note -no amount was entered), a whole 120k was transferred from his phone to the thief’s phone! This was immediately reported to MPESA but only 20k was recovered – the rest had been withdrawn within 30 minutes. The case was also reported to the police immediately – but the question is – what can the police do?

Someone please shed some light…

When you call the M-Pesa support line, you do get this impression of a "long queue in the bank". You know what I mean? Then you get a REP who is more interested in niceties than the problem you are reporting. I feel that the Special Crimes Prevention Unit needs to work very closely with the MNOs in finding ways of addressing such crime. They can setup a joint bureau to deal with this. I mean, some cops can be seconded to a joint unit formed and funded by the MNOs to address such crimes, so that action can be taken immediately. 30 minutes is so long in the electronic world. That theft could have been stopped.