Telecos Are Aiding Scam On The ‘Momo’ Market

It was exactly 24 minutes past eight in the morning when the phone rang. When I picked up the device, the voice at the other end sounded so apologetic that one might even sympathise with him.

“I have mistakenly sent someone's money into your wallet. Please, send it back to me.” My immediate response was to scream at him. I told him that I am not one of the novices who he and his colleague scammers have been conning all over the place. I added that I am a senior journalist, and that I know a thing or two about the scam doing the rounds.

I asked him to meet me at the head office of MTN, or the Odorkor Police Station, if he believed I needed to make any transfer to him. Five minutes later, an SMS message from the following number – +233241688503 was received.

It stated as following: “Mobile Money Payment: Received for GHS5550 from Christ Apostolic Church. Current Balance….Available Balance….Transaction ID 42251420. Charge is: fee 00.” The same message was repeated down the original message.

A few minutes later, the number called again, with the same voice claiming that he was a Mobile Money Agent who had accidentally sent someone else's money to my MTN wallet, and pleaded profusely for the money to be returned.

Within a second, his mood changed on the line. This time, he was threatening to get MTN to block my number for three days if the money was not returned immediately. I repeated my offer to meet with him at the MTN Head Office or the Odorkor Police Station, if he was really interested in getting anything from me. Barely two minutes after he had hanged up, a deep male voice called on a private number, claiming to be an official of MTN, telling me that a check into my 'Momo' account at MTN had confirmed the mistaken transfer, and instructed me re-wire the money to the number indicated in the transaction without delay.

I knew all along that I was dealing with a scammer, and told the man on the private number to get to either go to hell or the police would come after him. The number went dead immediately.

From my house, I drove straight to the nearest MTN office at the traffic lights at the Darkuman Junction on the main Accra-Cape Coast road, where I was asked to lodge a complaint with MTN Short-Code 1515. I filed the complaint at 12:16 pm, according to the instructions of the lady I dealt with. By the time I finished this piece at 6 pm, there had been no response from the Short Code. It tells a lot about how customers are suffering under Pontius Pilate at MTN and other telecos.

I did not stop there. I filed a telephone complaint with the Public Relations Unit of MTN immediately I got to the office from the MTN office at Darkuman junction. I was told that someone would call me and supply an official input into this article. God Almighty is a Ghanaian. To my utter surprise, the person who first called me on the issue from MTN happened to be the son of a deceased friend. I have never heard from Ridwan for ages. When I left the SSNIT Flats at Adenta, Ridwan was a small boy in the basic school.

I was thrilled to learn that through my complaint I had managed to establish contact with the son of my deceased friend – Kassim Shardow. Praise be to God!

I also spoke to a friend who once returned two telephone handsets I left behind after a media event at the plush Movenpick Ambassador Hotel. Beyond these chance encounters, there has been no joy on the report itself.

I am looking for a total solution to the problem, which is condemning many unsuspecting Ghanaians to fall prey to the machinations of those who play on the innocence of customers to skin them of their legitimate earnings. Too many unsuspecting people continue to fall prey to the scam. I am told that a lady was recently skinned off. The poor woman lost GH¢1,000, which represented her entire savings.

The woman received a message asking her to hold herself ready to receive a nice parcel from MTN. I am told that the poor woman had just been told of a serious illness afflicting her mother and needed money to send her to hospital. So when she was told that MTN was in the process of sending her money, she felt her prayers had been answered.

The call, indeed, came through. She was requested to perform a simple operation on her cellular phone. Out of enthusiasm, she carried out the instructions to the letter. By the time she could say Jack, her entire savings on her wallet, amounting to one thousand Ghana cedis, was gone to the wind.

There are no prizes for guessing what happened to the poor woman and her ailing mother. What is instructive is that just as I started relaying my experience in the office, my IT specialist told the story of a scam that nearly hit him yesterday, virtually at the same time I was going through my ordeal.

My IT man was chatting with colleagues in the office when he received a call from this number: 0247975116. When he answered, a person sounding seriously disturbed was on the line. According to the story, this man claimed that his father was on a hospital bed at Tarkwa in the Western Region. He tried to send an amount of GH¢750 to the seriously ill-father and made a mistake. Before he was aware, he had wired that amount into the Vodafone wallet of our IT specialist, and that, in the name of God he should have compassion on the seriously ill father and re-send the money to him, the scammer. He gave my staff member a special code number through which the money should be wired back.

That is not all the experience of my IT Specialist with money transfer scams. At the weekend, the same person received a call from a foreign-registered number. A woman was on the line. According to my IT specialist, the woman told him that her father was terribly ill in Ghana. To pay her medical bills, she had sent an initial amount of GH¢600. Unfortunately, the money had been mistakenly wired to the wallet of my staff's Vodafone account, and that he should try and send the money back.

That was not all, she spoke of goods from a company she named as Crown Agents, and that the goods would be given to my IT Specialist if he would return the so-called mistaken transfer.

Scams like these ought to be nipped in the bud. The scammers should be thrown into jail, and I believe MTN and other telecos companies in the Mobile Money business have a duty to themselves and their subscribers to end them.

In May 2010, an official announcement went forth that all cellular phone subscribers ought to register their Sim cards, and that failure to register same, using verifiable identification cards, would render their cellular phones unusable. Telecos in Ghana at the time – MTN, Vodafone, Tigo and Airtel – had their offices inundated with customers registering their sim cards.

The announcement added that any subscriber failing to register his or her sim card would not be able to make or receive any call on that number. Evidence is emerging that though the Telecos have not officially abandoned that original requirement, the silent war now waging for subscribers means that many unscrupulous dealers are finding a way round this by registering sim cards, using bogus identification cards. That, in nutshell, is what is aiding criminals to skim innocent customers.

Sources at some of the telecos companies indicate that the war on numbers means that there is virtually free for all for licensed agents. What is happening is that these agents register these sim cards using identification cards that could not be traced anywhere. And this is what has armed the scammers to go for the jugular. One would like to believe that the Ministry of Telecommunications would wade into the controversy and compel Telecos in the money transfer business to sanitise the enterprise. Too many subscribers are falling victim to the transfer scam. That is why I am annoyed as a social commentator.

I shall return!