An international scam in which mobile phone users are fleeced of their money by fraudsters has spread to Kenya, causing jitters among local service providers.
How scams in Kenya use phone calls to con innocent Kenyans
The scheme is designed to lure phone users into returning the “urgent” international calls, upon which they are unknowingly redirected to premium numbers that drain lines of credit.
In the scam, victims receive very brief or missed calls from unknown international numbers with frequent prefixes being +41 (Switzerland), +963 (Syria), +252 (Somalia), and +37 (Latvia).
The longer the caller stays on the line, the more money the swindlers make.
The scam, dubbed “wangiri” because the phone rings only once, has been reported elsewhere across the world, leading telecom firms in Europe and the United States (US) to raise the alarm.
The con men have now made their way into Kenya.
What you should do when you get a missed call from a foreign number
Safaricom customers who had been affected took to Twitter to complain while Telkom Kenya said it had received a “number of complaints” about the international calls.
Both companies have now warned customers to be wary of strange international calls and to ignore and block the callers.
“We have advised our customers to ignore these calls and to avoid returning any missed calls from unknown international numbers,” said Telkom Kenya.
Preventing these scam calls is difficult for telecom firms because it would be imprudent to block an entire country-prefix from calling into a network.
However, when the scam hit Ireland last year, operators asked customers to forward the numbers that had made the calls. These numbers would then be blocked from the network.
On Twitter, Safaricom has asked customers to forward the international numbers that have called them to 333, a short-code which the company makes available to customers for reporting fraud.
It is not clear if the company intends to follow international practice and block these numbers from its network.
Microsoft Support Scam in Kenya
A new and creative type of malware pretends to be Microsoft Security Essentials, a real antivirus suite used on Windows 7 and earlier.
Called Hicurdismos, the malware displays Microsoft’s classic Blue Screen of Death — with one key difference. It doesn’t actually harm your computer, but it can fool you into forking over your hard-earned cash to a tech-support scammer.
Microsoft shared information about the scam on its Malware Protection Center Threat Research & Response Blog. Hicurdismos is not the scariest piece of malware out there by any stretch, since it technically can’t compromise your computer in any way. On the other hand, for users who don’t know the ins and outs of Microsoft’s security lineup, it could convince them to make a very costly phone call.
Users who call the number can expect scammers pretending to be Microsoft representatives offering to fix their computers, for a hefty price. And they may even make good on their word; after all, there’s nothing actually wrong with their systems, and removing one piece of harmless malware is a very simple procedure.
Hicurdismos is most often encountered as a drive-by download, a piece of malware that tries to install itself as soon as you land upon a malicious or infected website. If the user gets an alert that the program cannot be verified — and there may not be such a warning — then the pop-up notification identifies the malware as Microsoft Security Essentials.
Upon installing the program, a user’s computer immediately displays the Windows 8 and 10 blue screen, complete with frowny-face punctuation and an error message stating that “Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart.” The program pretends that it will restart your computer, but doesn’t actually do anything.
In this case, you’re offered an option to call a toll-free number, which is something that a real Microsoft error message would never do. Furthermore, there’s one other key discrepancy in the scam, which would not be evident to the everyday user: The program displays an error message from Windows 8 and 10, but Microsoft Security Essentials exists only in Windows 7 and earlier. In more recent versions of the operating system, the program is called Windows Defender.
Luckily, you don’t have to call anyone for help. Simply run any competent antivirus program (Windows Defender will indeed do the job), and don’t bother downloading Microsoft antivirus programs next time; if you’re running Windows 8 or later, they’re already built into your machine. They’re not the best programs out there, but at least they’re no longer the worst.