As part of the MTN MoMo@15 celebrations, Mobile Money Limited (MTN MoMo), has been shedding light on the tactics fraudsters use to deceive unsuspecting MoMo users and defraud them.
Speaking during a MoMo@15 live session broadcasted on MTN’s Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn pages, two representatives of MTN MoMo, Nanatude Davies, Senior Manager, Enterprise Risk and Rena Ankrah, Manager, Anti-Money Laundering and Countering The Financing of Terrorism, explained how fraudsters operate, and also revealed several common scams targeting MTN MoMo users.
According to them, fraudsters do not specifically target individuals but instead make random calls, waiting to exploit whoever falls for their schemes.
On her part, Nanatunde Davies outlined several of the common fraudulent tactics used to trick customers as follows:
1. Fake Wrong Transfers: Fraudsters claim to have accidentally sent money to the victim’s account and ask for it to be returned. They may even caution the victim against checking their balance, and fake SMS alerts are often used to convince the target that money has indeed been transferred to him or her.
2. Posing as MTN Employees: Scammers pose as MTN staff and claim they are helping to reverse a wrongful transfer into the victim’s MoMo wallet. During this process, they trick victims into revealing their MoMo PIN, enabling the fraudsters to access their accounts.
3. Promo Scams: Customers receive calls or SMS messages claiming they have won a promotion or prize. Fraudsters then ask victims to dial specific numbers or share personal information, which often leads to financial loss to the victim.
4. Fake Loan Links: Fraudsters circulate fraudulent loan offers online, requesting personal information like a Ghana Card or other sensitive details to approve a loan, only to defraud victims in the process.
5. Fake Online Vendors: Scammers pose as online sellers, advertising products. After receiving payment for the goods, they block the victim’s number and vanish, leaving the customer defrauded.
6. E-Cash Liquidation: After a fraudster has managed to hack a wallet, they then plead with an unsuspecting person that their wallet has reach its limit so that person should receive the e-cash on their behalf and give them physical cash. Once the fraudster gets the cash he just runs off, and the victim who gave him the cash rather becomes a suspect in the fraud.
Rena Ankrah added that that fraudsters also use what she called WhatsApp Takeover, where they hack the WhatsApp accounts or victims, which they then use to solicit for money from persons in the victim’s WhatsApp contacts, pretending to be the owner of the account. Often, some unsuspecting persons send money to the fraudster before they later realize the money was sent to the wrong person.
Nanatunde Davies emphasised that MTN Mobile Money Limited (MML) is working to combat fraud on the platform, through three main security measures – prevention, detective and reporting.
Prevention
The preventive measures include education and training for customers and merchants to protect themselves against fraud, by keeping their PINs and IDs strictly private.
MTN also has a system that does SMS filtering to fish out suspicious text messages and flag them for action. Indeed, fraudsters manage to beat that system by deliberately spelling some words wrongly, just to make it difficult for the predictive tools to detect them.
Detective side
The detective measures is mainly an automated monitoring system on the MTN MoMo platform, which monitors transactions on the regular and flags ones that are found to be fraudulent or questionable, and block them. The system also funds and phone numbers involved.
Reports
MTN often received reports and complaints of fraud, which they work with law enforcement and liaise with other players like telcos, banks and Fintechs within the ecosystem to tract the stolen funds and retrieve them, and if possible tract the fraudsters and arrest them.
According to Nanatunde Davies, fraudsters usually move the stolen funds across networks and platforms to make it difficult to track and block, but with the collaboration of other stakeholders, they are able to track some of them and deal with them.
