Kericho Senator Aaron Cheruiyot on Sunday, 15 2022 came out to defend the Mulot hackers who made headlines over their sim swap schemes and fraud.
The Kericho legislator requested that Ksh1 billion be allocated to the hackers as they were the IT wizards only compared to those in Silicon Valley in California.
“The Silicon Savannah of Kenya, East Africa and Africa is here in Mulot town where you will find IT wizards,
It is because of tough economic times that they engage in this vice,
Some of the electronics and sim cards seized during a raid in Juja on Thursday, May 14, 2020.
Mr President, there was a project that was initiated by the ICT Authority through a Kenyan Software factory, they only require 100 acres to set up,
We request 1 billion shillings for the IT factory construction to employ 100,000 of our young people,”
In a veiled attack at Nairobi white-collar job workers, Cheruiyot intimated that they were nowhere near the Mulot hackers.
“In Nairobi, we have fellows sitting in offices in suits calling themselves IT experts, but here in Bomet, guys in t-shirts and shorts can dismantle software in five seconds,” he opined.
The legislator’s remarks came in light of an arrest in Mulot where a SIM swap fraud suspect was nabbed on suspicion of being behind a SIM swap scam.
Here, phone scammers hijacked a victim’s cell phone number and use it to gain access to sensitive personal data and bank accounts through mobile banking applications.
In 2021, police arrested the mastermind behind the disappearance of more than Ksh45 million from bank accounts belonging to unsuspecting Kenyans.
The suspect was arrested in his hideout in Mulot, Narok county after he was linked to an underground web of fraudsters siphoning money from bank accounts.
He was reported to have fraudulently acquired money from accounts belonging to 481 customers on mobile banking platforms.
Interestingly, over the years a number of suspects, all from Mulot, have been arrested over SIM swapping, mobile money and general fraud.
The fraudsters do SIM swaps by cloning victims’ accounts before stealing. In some cases, they use the victim’s details to borrow money from online lending platforms.
Victims of sim swap fraudsters should be on the lookout on how fraudsters have devised ways to access and steal their information from the public and how to prevent themselves from getting hacked.
In response to the raised concerns, President William Ruto directed Bomet County Governor Hillary Barchok together with the County Assembly to fast-track the allocation of land for the software factory in one month’s time.
Data by the Communications Authority for the period between January and March 2020 shows 34,644,531 cyber threats
Discussion about this post