Safaricom has announced a new feature set to protect customers through SMS notifications whenever their ID numbers are being used to register for a line without their consent. The action comes at a time of increased fraud by malicious people who tend to have multiple lines.

The security feature will send you verification messages from the number 707. The short message will inquire on whether or not the registration is valid. By simply reply with a YES or NO you will let the agent be aware whether to resume the registration process or not.

There have obviously been various cases of identity theft, transaction forgery and even straight-up conning where Kenyans end up losing lots of money. CRB lists have also been getting bigger with people who are never even aware that their details were used to get loans.

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When someone gets to know your ID number, they can use to register for new lines, sign up to loan apps and leave you with huge debts. Moreover, many have also had their ID numbers used in malicious M-PESA transactions that could leave you in deep trouble. This is definitely a welcome action by the firm to protect its millions of subscribers.

Nevertheless, there is still a lot more that needs to be done in terms of protecting M-PESA users from privacy violation. Perhaps, this could be the first action into solving the numerous flaws that Safaricom subscribers are still vulnerable to. This is when it comes to phone number registrations, public sharing of information and with M-Pesa.