Safaricom admits to compromised promotion, blames hackers

Safaricom has admitted to a compromised promotion and now blames hackers who took over using internt bots to increase their chances of winning the competition.

In a statement, Director of Corporae Affairs Noka Waita said that this was eatbalished through an audit of all the activities involved in the running and subsequent evaluation of the short list for the winners in the ‘SafFunFriday’ competition.

“Internet bots are online applications that perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a person to do alone. This translated to a single user being able to increase their chances of winning during online promotions; the equivelant of registering several times under different names to participate a competition in real life. We have further established that the same bots have been used in several other social media based competitions ran by other organizations,” said Waita.

While admitting the compromise, Nzioka also admitted that Safaricom failed to be vigilant to know what was happening on their system.

“We accept the fact that we should have been more vigilant in identifying the use of these “bots” by unscrupulous persons and we apologize unreservedly for any inconvenience that those competing fairly in the said online promotion may have suffered. We wish to assure all our followers on twitter that we have taken the appropriate steps to ensure that this does not happen again during any of our future online promotion,” Waita’s statement concludes.

Earlier on, Techmoran had reported that Bob Collymore had promised that the company would look into the matter after a blogger unearthed the irregularity.