We’ve talked about fake EcoCash payments before, here and more recently here. Another case of EcoCash related cyber-crime has occurred with a Bulawayo based man being accused of defrauding a supermarket after faking EcoCash payments to the tune of 20 000 on different occasions.
He is said to have approached the employees at the supermarket with fake EcoCash messages purporting to have paid for some groceries and the employees allowed him to take the groceries.
The matter reportedly came to light in September when the supermarket conducted an audit which revealed a mismatch between Ecocash transactions and those recorded manually in the books.
Pindula
The problem with fake messages being used for cybercrime is that for the perpetrators of such crime the degree of ease with which they can carry out these crimes is shockingly easy since there are tonnes of apps to generate fake messages on app stores. I explained why these apps exist in the first place:
The developers behind the apps advertise their applications as being great for pranks but unfortunately in countries such as ours where use of mobile money is prevalent – the apps have found a new and more sinister purpose.
Fraudsters Using Fake EcoCash Messages To Fool Retailers
To make matters worse, EcoCash has in recent weeks been a dumpster fire with users of the mobile money platform not instantly getting confirmations when they pay for products. One would assume merchants have been going through the same problem which allows fraudsters to just blame the lack of receipt of a confirmation message on EcoCash’s “downgrade”.
As long as the EcoCash system isn’t working correctly and EcoCash doesn’t educate merchant and users on the existence of message generating applications, this form of cybercrime will continue to occur at an alarming rate since it’s so easy to generate fake messages.
