Safaricom today held an online event marked for the release of its 10th Sustainable Business Report. Attended by Safaricom top executives, the event saw the telco detail its efforts to achieve the goal of transforming lives. This covers all its strategies towards the wellbeing of its customers and shareholders socially, economically and environmentally. This is within the fiscal year from 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021.

Among the points in the report was the firm’s efforts towards creating a strong internal ethical culture and combatting fraud. This comes at a time when the cases of illegal SIM card registration have been prevalent, an issue that the telco acknowledged.

According to Safaricom, the 2021 financial year (FY21) did see a slight rise in the number of cases reported and investigated compared to 2020. From issues to do with policy breaches, data privacy and SIM swap, 2021 reported a total of 36 cases compared to last year’s 35.

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In response to all this, Safaricom pledged to fight these internal ethical issues through fraud management squads that have already been set up. The squads are tasked with targeting irregular registrations, focused awareness to customers and reviewing SIM selling processes in the various outlets across the country.

“Identity theft and social engineering fraud have been some of the most common forms of fraud targeted at our M-PESA customers. In FY21, we continued with our customer fraud awareness drive. We highlighted the issues through an above-the-line campaign under the tag Jichanue and Take Control, using radio, TV, and digital channels. With the aim to reach all customers, we sent out over 63 million SMS broadcasts. Additionally, our digital channels reached 9.5 million people and our radio campaign reached over 8 million people,” partly reads the report from Safaricom.

As it stands, customers also get to have more control over identity theft. This is through the recently set up USSD menu that allows one to check whether the ID card numbers have been used to register SIM cards illegally.

So, there is definitely hope at the end of the tunnel despite the huge work ahead.