Although telecoms have done their best to curb the fraud surrounding the service, defrauders also reinvent their business plans, they build networks and work together to advance their illicit agendas. Criminals have resorted to social engineering to get into mobile money accounts and exploit mobile money customers online. Follow along as we uncover the new common mobile money scam fraudsters use to make a fortune.
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The Social Engineered SMS
In the middle of the pandemic, I was on a call with a colleague of mine to send me money as part of the remaining balance for the service I had offered. Shortly after concluding the conversation, he called to confirm if I had received the money and to his surprised, I hadn’t. He then mentioned the SMS he got shortly after our phone call. The SMS goes thus: After carefully digesting the environment we had been talking, we realized we got scammed and the fraudster didn’t even have to break a sweat. For us, we concluded it wasn’t a well-coordinated scam but rather, a bit of sheer luck on the fraudster side. But imagine an instance where the criminals work in collaboration with dubious mobile money agents or fellow scammers. Such SMS messages could lead several mobile money users to send funds to the wrong numbers. The impact would be devastating. They would know the right numbers which are actively sending money and target such people with spam text messages. To protect yourself from falling victim to this (new) scam, make sure you double-check that the receipient indeed sent the sent the SMS message —if you ever got a text like this. And if you’ve sent the case to the fraudster, you could reach out to the customer service to revert the money. The transaction will be reversed and you’ll get your money back. However, this is only possible if the fraudster hasn’t withdrawn the money from their account yet. I recently got a similar text to send money to a random MTN number which I wasn’t expecting. It then hit me that the scammers are really busy trying to get new victims. However, I didn’t fall for it for the second time and you shouldn’t either.
Other Common Mobile Money Scam
We have extensively covered the different scenarios of mobile money scams in our past blogs which you can read here. But as the nature of these attacks keep evolving, it’s better to keep logs on these common attacks; If you have been scammed or you have any security tips for us, let us know in the comments section.
