Report cons to run them out of town

Some scams never die. Last weekend, I got treated to a fake MPesa payment for the first time in a while. The depressing thing is that even after all these years scammers are still pulling that stunt because somewhere somebody is still getting caught out by it.

It’s hard to understand how. When that supposed incoming Mpesa payment hits your phone there are two things that mark it out as a fake. It doesn’t arrive from MPesa, which is pretty easy really: if it’s come from a telephone number and does not say Mpesa in the sender line, it’s fake.

And it doesn’t change your Mpesa balance. In fact, there’s no line about your MPesa balance in it anywhere.

Moreover, Safaricom #ticker:SCOM is perfectly able to deal with any genuinely mis-sent money, and will just get on with reversing it.

Nonetheless, for my recent fake, after an hour, a call came: could I return it? I told them to report it to Safaricom. But the person was in hospital and couldn’t report it to Safaricom.

These scams are painful. They can call my number, which costs air time, but not Safaricom on 100 for free? Funny hospital.

Either way, I was insistent they call Safaricom, and the call ended. But moments later I got a call from a landline, and that was my first time at the next level scam. The caller claimed to be Safaricom customer care.

They asked if I had received a payment. I said if they could see one, they could reverse it: end of matter.

Not so. The caller also asked me to give my MPesa balance, which I refused. Safaricom is never going to ask for your balance — they can see it, so why ask?

And then on to the next level, the caller wanted to give me a code to ‘reactivate’ my Mpesa account, and instructions to put the code in.

They were saying my MPesa was deactivated on the mis-send, which, let’s be clear, is impossible, and will never happen.
So I refused, said I was reporting the call, and the call ended.

Reporting MPesa scammers is the easiest thing in the world. You just forward the fake text and the number to 333.

Not hard: and one more fake line closed down. But I also called Safaricom as well, because the second landline caller had my full name, not my everyday name, but my official, for-the-records, with middle name too, name, which they asked me to confirm.

How did they get that? Safaricom is investigating: gave me a case number, said it will take four days.

But this thing of changing codes is much worse than the old ‘send it back’.

Because once you have put in the new PIN they give you – they have the PIN! And can get all of it. Laughable in my case, for my Sh330 balance.

But it’s been an international fashion lately. In the UK, one woman took a call supposedly from her bank saying her online account had been compromised and getting her to change access codes.

The scammers then rang the bank with the right access codes, and stole the lot. And that wasn’t Sh330, it was a lot.

No financial service provider will ever call asking you to change codes. The original gets set by you, or sent in a cryptic inked envelope. They never just give it to you verbally or by phone.

So never change it for any caller. It’s simply an invitation to give your access to someone else: and they won’t be wanting it for your security.