A 21-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly hacking into the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) database, acquired personal details of 61,617registered voters from a county in western Kenya and defrauded them of money running into millions of shillings.
According the the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), the suspect was in possession of data which contained names of registered voters, their ID numbers and dates of birth.
Using the fraudulently acquired personal details, the suspect then contact different wireless carriers and convince the customer service agents that they are the true owners of the line. Upon successful SIM swapping, the suspect is granted full access to the victim’s online accounts.
The 21-year-old believed to have previously worked for one of Kenya’s mobile phone networks, was arrested in Juja by DCI sleuths from Crime Research and Intelligence Bureau, supported by Safaricom’s fraud investigations team and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology security officers, on Friday July 16, 2021.
The suspect is also believed to have been operating a high-tech mobile phone scam syndicate. Upon his arrest, a gunny bag full of SIM cards belonging to Safaricom, Airtel and Telcom mobile phone service providers was recovered.
His arrest followed a joint operation by DCI detectives and Safaricom investigators after the suspect swindled an MPESA agent, an unspecified amount of money.
The fraudster masquerading as an M-PESA customer care attendant, called the agent and lured her into dialing unspecified codes.
Before the agent realized that she was in a phony call, she had already lost cash from her money lending account. The money was sent to an MPESA account belonging to one of the fraudulently acquired SIM cards, before being transferred to an account at Cooperative bank.
The suspect who has only been identified as Kiprop and his accomplices who narrowly escaped the arrest, is believed to have swindled unsuspecting members of the public millions of shillings through this pretentious scheme.