The Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) has paraded a group of six young men from Ruhango District arrested for mobile money fraud crimes done in the city of Kigali.
According to RIB, the youthful group has been living together in Kigali and have been jointly plotting several theft schemes targeting mobile money agents in the city.
Their arrest came as RIB was following up on a number of reports filed to it by mobile money agents in the month of July, complaining of having been cheated of money.
Working together with telecom companies to investigate, RIB managed to apprehend the group of suspected fraudsters - young men ranging between 20 to 27 years of age.
Arrested on July 25, the band has been operating in Kigali for about the last 45 days.
How they have been stealing:
According to RIB, members of the group used to approach mobile money agents and ask them for the service of depositing money to their accounts. While the agent carried out the process, the suspects would cunningly peep on the agent’s phone screen and see the secret pin.
They would then ask the agent to sell to them his or her phone - on a very good price. If the agent accepted to sell, they would request to check the phone. Here, they would slickly remove the agent’s sim-card, replace it with another, and hand back the phone to him or her – claiming that they have not liked it and wouldn’t buy it.
They would then rush and swiftly transfer the money from the agent’s sim-card to the account of one of the members of the group – who would withdraw it very fast.
Speaking in an interview with media, Emmanuel Muhayimana, 23, one of the suspects said they started carrying out such schemes in Kigali about 45 days ago, operating in places including Remera, Kimironko, Batsinda, and so on.
He said he had stolen about 800,000 Rwandan Francs so far.
Asked how he started engaging into such activities, Muhayimana said he was a mobile money agent and he was cheated in such ways, and he later decided to venture into the theft himself.
Another suspect, Jean-Claude Habineza, 21 said one of the factors that saw him engaged in such was poverty and not having work to do.
"Emmanuel (Muhayimana) told me he could show me something to do. So, I came to Kigali (from Ruhango). He told me he would be getting money from agents, send it to me, and I would withdraw it,” he said.
According to Dominique Bahorera, the Acting Spokesperson of RIB, investigators are encountering many cases related to mobile money fraud, though he did not present the actual statistics.
He added that there are about ten ways that people are being cheated via mobile money. Among these, fraudsters send deceitful text messages to customers informing them that they have received money on their accounts. Then, they (fraudsters) immediately call their victims asking them to reverse the money, something that unsuspecting clients fall for.
In mid-June this year, RIB said that in the previous two months it had received about 80 cases of people whose money was stolen from mobile phones. In these schemes, close to Rwf12 million was stolen.