Scammers Are Using Facebook To Prey On People In Kenya

The spread of COVID-19, which has risen to 27,425 cases in Kenya since March 13, inspired scammers to create new variations.

Frederick, another victim who declined to give his real name, is a waiter who lost his job in the wake of the pandemic. He fell for a coronavirus volunteer recruitment version of the scam, where he paid a “registration fee” to get short-listed for a job but never heard back from the recipient. He blamed the legitimate-looking nature of the pages and the desperation of his situation.

“At the time I was really desperate for a job and the cash I sent them was the chunk of the little I had. It’s a shame as you can imagine how many people they have stolen from,” he said.

Noah Miller, a cybersecurity researcher and cofounder of the Sochin Research Institute in Nairobi, said the high usage of Facebook in Kenya has led people to trust it. “Facebook is a trusted zone for communication for many Kenyans. In this environment, people’s first instinct is to trust what they see,” he told BuzzFeed News. ”You will trust it more than an email that comes to you directly, and therefore it’s easier for scammers to get to you there instead of sending you an email.”

Since 2016, Facebook has invested in artificial intelligence and human fact-checkers and reviewers. Of the company’s estimated 30,000 global content reviewers, 130 are based in Nairobi, the company’s only sub-Saharan Africa content review center. It is run by Samasource, a company headquartered in San Francisco that provides data labeling services for AI technologies.

Facebook has also partnered with Pesacheck, AFP, Africa Check, France 24 Observers, and Dubawa to perform fact-checking in sub-Saharan Africa. Alphonce Shiundu of Africa Check said they deal with scams in addition to their primary work debunking falsehoods.

But Facebook and its regional partners seem powerless to stop the scams.

“This is a widespread problem that we’ve been facing on Facebook. We have been seeing a lot of these scams,” Shiundu said. “It’s been a game of whack-a-mole with these scammers on Facebook. When we spot one and rate it as false, they open another one and another one. We have basically been chasing them around Facebook.”

The scams have also caught the attention of Kenya’s authorities, who have repeatedly warned of an increase in such scams as COVID-19 has made people more desperate for jobs and loans. Peter Mbatha, a cyber forensics expert at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), said when asked during a webinar in June that DCI collaborates with Facebook, but did not say whether or not they work together to combat scams. “The DCI is able to communicate with them, and we can make requests on any criminal aspects touching on individuals who have used their platforms. They usually respond when they are called upon to handle such matters and issues.”

Shiundu said automated systems and algorithms aren’t enough to catch the scammers early on.

“If we leave it to algorithms, which is what they use to flag [content] to fact-checkers, then that becomes slow, algos cannot answer everything and we find a lot of false positives,” he said.

Robin Busolo, a lawyer who handles regulatory affairs at the Communications Authority of Kenya, the body that regulates Kenya’s communications industry, told BuzzFeed News that Facebook had a responsibility to deal with crimes taking place on its platform.

“I doubt whether Facebook can be absolved from their culpability in the case where harm is meted out on their platform,” he said. But he was also frank that “we have no jurisdiction over them.”

That leaves victims of crimes that happen on Facebook like Elizabeth with no hope of seeing it reined in or penalized in Kenya, leaving caution as the only option.

“People need to be careful about how they use these online platforms,” she said. “It’s not as safe as most of us might like to think. What happened to me has probably happened to many vulnerable people, and it could’ve been a lot worse.”

This article was developed with the support of the Money Trail project.