This archive report was first published on 18 July 2021.
On Saturday morning, detectives from the Crime Research and Intelligence Bureau, assisted by Safaricom's fraud investigations team and security officers from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, arrested a 21-year-old man in Juja.
The suspect, who had previously worked for one of Kenya's mobile phone networks, was apprehended with a bag containing SIM cards belonging to Safaricom, Airtel, and Telcom mobile phone service providers.
According to the police, the suspect had been running a high-tech mobile phone scam organisation for over a year, targeting hundreds of victims.
His modus operandi involved hacking into the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) database and obtaining personal information on registered voters, including their ID numbers and dates of birth.
The suspect would then use this information to convince customer service representatives at various wireless carriers that they were the true owners of the line, successfully swapping SIM cards and gaining full access to the victim's online accounts.
Police also recovered data with the names of registered voters, their ID numbers, and their dates of birth, which the suspect had obtained from the IEBC database.
Previously, the suspects had hacked into the IEBC database and obtained personal information on 61,617 registered voters in a Western Kenya county.
