Over 5 Million Kenyans Already Conned Through Their Phones, Are you a victim?

Whenever my mother calls to just check up on me, her voice is normally calm so when I received her call a week ago and she was literally screaming into my ears, I panicked for a moment but her reason for calling was to soon have me laugh myself to tears.

Have you ever lost to a con artist money, electronic or just any good? Well if you have, then you will understand the embarrassment that adds to the pain of your loss.

She had lost 10,000 shillings to a con who had called pretending to be a customer care agent in a large Telco company in Kenya.

My mother’s biggest mistake was giving out her PIN which enabled the con artist to swap her sim card and withdraw from her account, this is despite the number of times I had repeated to her that her PIN was PERSONAL and not even me should have access to it.

The 10,000 shillings was to be my siblings’ school fees but not even that could stop the tickling effect that had me laughing to the point of her hanging up on me, don’t judge me, It was beyond my control.

There are so many of us here that continue to lose to con artists and the most embarrassing thing about the ordeals is that the narratives make one sound so naïve and silly, they would rather shush about it.

If it is any consolation, over 5 million Kenyans have been conned through their phones in this 2019 year that is yet to end and 20 percent of those have failed to recover their monies according to a report published by Financial Sector Deepening (FSD).

The FSD report dubbed Inclusive Finance draws its conclusions from observations made from the Finaccess 2019 Household survey authored jointly by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) and reveals that an estimated 30 percent of all mobile money users have been conned through phone calls or SMS.

The Inclusive Finance Report also shows that 80 percent of the conned Kenyans have managed to recover their lost money while 20 percent have no chances at recovering their hard-earned money, unfortunately for my mother; she falls in the group of 20 percent.

As a victim to con artists, did you recover whatever it is that you had lost and what was your experience?

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