Fraud is an ongoing issue for the mobile money industry with new, and increasingly complex, scams being committed as the industry matures and diversifies. This is detrimental to providers who are keen to protect their consumers and retain trust in their services.
To address the increasing concern of fraud, mobile money providers have worked with law enforcement agencies and implemented best practices being adopted internationally to help strengthen their controls and safeguarding against fraud and scammers. However, do to the dynamic and reactive nature of fraud, there is a need across the industry for more transparency and communication to tackle the issue of fraud.
A key way to build this trust and encourage effective communication is through rapid and comprehensive reporting of fraud instances to regulators.
Currently, many mobile money providers report fraud instances annually to regulators, however this can leave the industry vulnerable for longer than necessary.
What is needed is real-time reporting of fraud instances along with the measures implemented to reduce the impact. This should be shared as quickly as possible with regulators who can then notify other financial service providers enabling them to proactively alert agents and customers and mitigate the risks.
The GSMA have researched and reviewed several reporting criteria used by different regulators, including the Central Bank of Kenya and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority for e-money businesses, and developed a fraud reporting template for real-time fraud reporting purposes.
This template can be found here.
The GSMA plans to develop best practice responses for these fraud typologies that will help guide mitigation responses from the industry. We will be keeping the template updated with new fraud typologies and will work with the industry to best understand the risks and challenges being faced.
We encourage the industry to work with international organisations (such as CGAP), policymakers and law enforcement agencies (such as Interpol) to develop knowledge-sharing protocols and mitigation strategies, and to put these into action.
If you would like to learn more about this template, please reach out at: [email protected]