Safaricom has today introduced a new feature that alerts you via SMS when someone registers a line using your ID through an SMS number 707.
Through their Twitter official page, Safaricom announced that they will be enabling the feature on our mobile phones.
Safaricom is working on curbing fraud cases that have been on the increase. Fraudsters have been using rogue M-Pesa agents and other avenues to steal from customers. The new development will come in handy for customers and give them more authority and privacy over their money and data.
CA has repeatedly warned Kenyans against smishing; where the fraudster sends SMS texts purporting to originate from a reputable company. With the purpose of tricking subscribers into revealing personal information such as ID numbers, passwords, PINS and credit card details among other personal details.
CA through the National Kenya Computer Incident Response Team Coordination Centre had has received reports involving theft of personal identification information through social engineering leading to SIM swap fraud.
The report also indicated that postpaid customers face higher losses than their prepaid counterparts since their billing is usually at the end of the month.
Fraudsters have been evolving new scams every other time. They trick the victims to be calling from Safaricom’s customer care and ask them to share their details for help but end up stealing from them. In most cases, they claim that their SIM card has been damaged, upon which they ask for personal information in order to ‘restore’ it.
This kind of fraud is difficult to spot and even more difficult to come back from as the fraudsters gain access and control of everything linked to the victim’s card, which includes mobile money passwords, social media, internet banking, credit card and banking information among many others. Safaricom’s new feature will narrow the occurrence of such unfortunate cases.