This archive report was first published on 6 November 2019.
Published on November 6, 2019, a report by Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Kenya revealed that over 5 million mobile money users in Kenya have been duped by online scammers this year.
The report, titled Inclusive Finance?, drew its observations from the Finaccess 2019 Household Survey jointly authored by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), and FSD.
According to the report, nearly 30% of all mobile money users in Kenya have been duped, experiencing loss of money through fraud mostly through hoax SMSs or phone calls.
While 80% of the scammed Kenyans have been able to retrieve their cash, a whooping 20% of the users were not able to recover their hard-earned money.
“Mobile money users had substantially more challenges than users of regulated financial services like banks and mobile banks,” reads the report.
The report lists security (loss of money/fraud), transparency, and system downtime as the major challenges that Kenyans have encountered when using financial services this year.
