Scamming

 THE HACKING AND SCAMMING NIGHTMARE!

Hacking of accounts and later on scamming the owners of the accounts have become a rampant issue in the recent past in Kenya. This uncouth act has been going on for a long time now. It has affected the victims to inexplicable measures. it ranges from the hacking of social media accounts, bank accounts, and credit cards to WhatsApp scams. It has been common now in Kenya and we are not seeing anything much being done by the authorities to quash this financial ‘pandemic’. And since the government is not doing anything to bring the perpetrators to book, some of the victims have taken the law into their own hands and have proven to be ferocious and lethal in revenge to recover their lost fortunes from the scammers which lead to the death of the recently discovered mutilated bodies of the ‘Kasarani 4’ one Frank Obegi who happens to be a former student at the Multimedia University of Kenya.

One may ask themselves why a group of young vibrant men could engage in this fatal act of fraud and scams. Well, for starters it's because there are not many job opportunities to equal the number of graduates being churned out by our universities and colleges. This has been an enormous underlying problem that each government comes in and promises to fix but fails to keep their end of the bargain. At this juncture, the graduates with their skills fresh from the university find themselves idle and when such chances come around, it becomes hard for one to deny since survival remains the only option but we all know that one can't survive without a job and there into the abyss of crime they go.

Another reason which might have propelled this act might be the high rise of poverty. The English put it very well when they said that a dying man will clutch the straw. Poverty makes these graduates and those involved follow the Machiavellian principle of ‘ the end justifies the means’. If they are not caught then good for them but if they are caught then they are happy to pay the price having lived life in a fast lane. Pressure and trends which people want to keep up with also force these creative youths into this life of crime. Peer pressure has never ended in high school. Clout chasing is much more rampant in the real world than what one is accustomed to in high school. Keeping up with celebrity life becomes a tussle and people end up losing their lives because they wanted to impress people who don't even care about them. Many countless reasons could be given as to why people can engage in these acts but at the end of the day we will look like we are condoning crimes so here is what I think should be done to reduce these crimes.

We can not remove financial frauds or scams for good but we can put in measures to curb their rapid occurrences. We are in an election year and I implore the incoming government to give the unemployment crisis a bigger look. The government should open up hubs of innovation which do not frustrate the innovators but encourage creativity so that people could be occupied with work instead of thinking to defraud another person for their hard-earned money. Government should liaise with the central bank and commercial banks to put in measures to protect the accounts of their customers from fraud.

Many people now are being defrauded through M-Pesa(the largest mobile wallet in Kenya ). Most of those carrying out these scams are disgruntled former employees of Safaricom. It's incumbent upon Safaricom to improve their security because the constant loss of money may be detrimental to the credibility of their services. Many people have been defrauded this way and no one is happy losing his money when they thought that their money is secure in their phones. The public should be advised to not give out their crucial details to any suspicious person calling and pretending to be from Safaricom. When one receives a message or a call from those scam artists it should be reported immediately to the relevant authorities. This way we can be vigilant and stay up to date with ways of fending off these scams.

Someone might say I should not advise people who have not been given a choice to change but I will. The best-case scenario of a scammer is a short-lived celebrity life. These flashes should not persuade one to engage in these types of crimes because they will always come back home to roost. This should not be the life one had pictured while torturing themselves through studies only to come and die in the hands of the unforgiving avengers. Parents, in this case, can not even approve of what you have been doing as their child because they believed in you that's why they struggled hard to put one through those schools. Remember it's better a cent earned than a shilling stolen.