Accra, Ghana//-Digital fraud, which involves illegal activities conducted online to steal money or personal information, using methods like phishing emails, vishing phone calls, smishing texts, and malware, will derail financial technology (Fintech) businesses if industry players don’t address it.
Shaibu Haruna, Chief Executive Officer of MobileMoney Limited (MML), MTN Ghana subsidiary responsible for mobile financial services, gave the warning at a Media Roundtable held in Accra today.
“The issue around digital fraud is a very important subject, which is why I kept it for last in my presentation. For us, this is one of the things that will derail our progress if we don’t address it as an industry”, he stated.
“It is important that we distinguish it because a lot of the time, people say it is called MoMo fraud. I think that is the common terminology that is used. But it has gone beyond just MoMo (Mobile Money) fraud.
When you look at it in terms of every interaction today, you do, you have to pay for a service, and a lot of the use cases that we are seeing are coming from a lot of digital channels, but because the payment mechanism is often on a mobile money account, it becomes a conversation”.
Concerted approach
Mr Haruna therefore called for a concerted approach to towards dealing with the pervasive digital fraud canker in the West African country.
“For us, this is the way we look at that landscape. Number one is platform and internal control which is very important for us, and that is the core of our business and the core of what we do. Ensuring that our mobile money platform is robust especially from a security standpoint which is something non-negotiable. The investment in that space is always guaranteed to ensure that we have the best security system in place on our platform” he told the journalists.
The CEO surrounded by his executive leadership, assured that the investment in terms of the platform security is not in question, saying that the board of the company has never question him when it comes to investment in tools for security of the mobile money service platform. That is something the business doesn’t hesitate at all in making those investments, Mr Haruna stated.
On digital financial literacy
Touching on digital financial literacy, he said the company has taken a very bold step especially for this year. This is because they have made a deliberate investment in driving a lot of this campaign by starting of the fact that fraud is a central theme of all their campaigns and messages.
Mr Haruna explained: “We deployed what we called Shine Your Eye campaign which is a platform that we created to go into the fraud hotspot cases areas” with targeted community-based engagements using the Shine Your Eye platform which was launched early this year.
Also, he added that the company set up its social media channels by creating dedicated a MoMo channel on key MTN Ghana social media platforms to enhance consumer engagement and education.
Answering on digital fraud and its related areas, the Chief Regulatory, Risk and Compliance Officer of MobileMoney LTD, Godwin Kwami Tamakloe said they did not as a business anticipate such a magnitude of fraudulent activities in that industry.
In his words: “When look at the financial industry in general, one thing that goes with it is financial crime and it comes in different forms-cyber and all those kinds of things”.
So, looking at the fraud triangle which shows the vulnerabilities around financial services, Mr Tamakloe noted that it is either technology where people could hack into a business or an individual system and take money away or hack into your system, take care of your data and request for some ransom before they will release the data or probably it.
He also noted that the common types of digital fraud include identity theft, account fraud, and payment scams, which could lead to significant financial losses for individuals and businesses.
Mr Tamakloe therefore advised customers of the MoMo service not to share their PINs and also beware that fraudsters are always making cunning ways to get into their wallets.
