Safaricom,
Kenya’s largest and leading mobile network operator in the country. Operating
with over 2billion USD as its revenue it has been able to make its way into the
mobile industry with less than a span of two decades.
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| Safaricom House |
In the past
few years people have been greatly complaining on the high prices of Safaricom
Data bundles and not only the price but how fast they get exhausted I don’t
want to go there but my line of concentration is the few ‘entrepreneurs’ who
saw opportunity in that and made a fortune out of it by buying bulk bundles and
selling them at a cheaper price thus attracting more and more customers
compared to the legally subscribed ones by Safaricom. All those who are from
Campus will tell you that this is better known as ‘bundles mwitu’. In 2015 Bob Collymore
stood out and said that the bundles mwitu were not illegal but highly
discouraged buyers as fraudsters would take an opportunity to exploit them.
Later on
Safaricom raised claims that some top company officials were involved in a scam
that they stole the bundles and sold them at cheaper prices and after
investigations some of this people were arrested and lost their jobs. Things
seemed to have gotten back on line after the company took action. I got
interested and decided to take a picnic on the same issue months later I have
come up with this.
Late last
year I met a student of one of the campuses in Kenya who did not wish that I
mention his full name but only use his AKA Ibrah. Ibrah had been selling this
bundles for over two years in fact he had made an empire out of it. He started
selling the bundles way back before
joining campus and when he got to campus where the market was ready and demand
was high he expanded his business to an extended that he opened a Lipa na
M-pesa till number. The till number was registered as a browsing shop at
Safaricom and not bundle sales business.
Well the
question your all asking yourself is where was he getting his the bundles from?
I also got interested in the same and after asking he told me he had an inside
source that he was working for at that time. The inside source who we have
decided to hide his name would supply him with a bulk of bundles and he would
do the job of supplying or rather selling. Ibrah told me that in a day he would
make up so much money that his M-pesa would get to the maximum amount of
transaction that he would not receive any more money. Later on Ibrah’s got into
another line of business that led to his line being blocked.
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| Poster advertising discounted bundles |
After his
line got blocked he decided to contact Safaricom customer care and he was
instructed to go to their main offices because his line was characterized with
fraud. Ibrah made a step and went up to the main offices at the main offices
you would assume he would be arrested and aligned to court but this did not
happen instead he was asked to pay an amount he did not disclose to me and his
line was back to work
This opened
a new avenue for Ibrah after visiting the Safaricom towers more doors opened
and that night another Safaricom employee contacted him with an offer to use
him as an avenue to sell his data bundles too. He was able to record the 6
minutes call that they had with him and he gave it to me Ibrah declined the
offer since he still had a reliable source and the guy most probably looked for
another avenue to sell his data.
Ibrah later
quit the business not because all doors to get the data were locked NO but
because he feared that one day the long arm of the government would get hold of
him and he would be in trouble and again he feared he would miss his
certificate of good conduct if he was caught.
I cannot
dismiss Ibrah’s claims since it was just yesterday when I met this poster on a
notice board when I was roaming around an institution its name i chose not to disclose
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| codes used to feed in bundles |
Safaricom
data bundles going at only Ksh.100 for 500MB Ksh.250 for
2GB and much more where
the hell are they getting this data from no one would buy bulk data and sell it
at a loss that’s just outta question. So I again made a move to call the number
that was in that poster and decided to act as a customer and see if I could dig
out something little out of the guy selling the bundles. We met had a friendly
talk but he would not reveal his source all I saw is that he took a long piece
of paper with many numbers arranged vertically and each group had about 15 numbers
and told me to give him my phone so that he would load it with data. I managed to sneak and take a picture of the
paper as you can see by the side
Where are
the cheap bundles coming from? Who is responsible for them? Is it a legit
business? Is Safaricom aware of these bundles? Is it an inside job? This and
more questions still remain a mystery to me and many others and only one person
can answer them the Service providers…
We will try
to reach to the service provider for the answers meet us next as we try to seek
answers from Safaricom.
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