Mobile money fraud: MTN to train Judges

In the coming few days, the management of mobile telecommunications giant, MTN Ghana, will be training selected judges in Ghana on how fraudsters take advantage of the mobile money transactions to defraud unsuspecting customers.

Godwin Kwame Tamakloe, Senior Manager, AML Compliance & Analytics, has said the training for the judges is purposed to inform the decisions they make in respect to Mobile Money fraud cases that are brought before them by the police.

He explained that the company has already trained personnel of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service on how the mobile money system operates to enable them detect fraud with ease.

Speaking at a capacity building workshop for Members of the Journalists for Business Advocacy (JBA) in Accra on Thursday, October 26, Mr Tamakloe said: “The training of the judges is a plan that came up and so we will surely be engaging the right people within the right quarters.

“As we did with the police, we will also do the same thing for the judges; that is the plan that we want to have. They are also another part of the stakeholders we believe play significant roles within the space.”

Touching generally on the Mobile Money operations, Mr Tamakloe stated that the transaction is safe, although there a few miscreants who will want to take advantage of it to dupe unsuspecting customers.

He explained that MTN Ghana has put in place strict measures to help in combating frauds associated with the transaction.

“We have invested in systems to monitor and track the Mobile Money transactions. We have also provided helplines that the customers can call. The Call Centre is 100, the agents can also call 114 when they are encountering challenges with the system,” he added.

Dispelling assertions that some staff of MTN may be engaging in the Mobile Money fraud, he stated that: “There is no evidence of MTN employees engaging in the mobile money fraud,” adding, “We review our access to know the employees who have access to what platform we monitor. We also have a system that reviews all the audit trails.

“We receive 365 complaints monthly. Because of MTN’s large market share, that is why we have this number of complaints, it doesn’t mean the other telcos do not have such complaints.”