Safaricom sacked 118 employees in the year ended March 2026, coinciding with a period the firm recovered Sh953 million in inflated agent commissions as it intensified the war on fraud.
The dismissals, disclosed in the latest sustainability report, rose from 113 in the previous year, marking the fourth straight year of rising number of employees let go due to fraud.
This emerged in a period when Kenyans lost Sh491.6 million after cyber-criminals hijacked victims’ mobile phone numbers in the so-called SIM-swapping fraud, according to the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) in a separate report.
Interpol reckons that Kenya’s SIM swap fraud surged by 327 percent last year on the back of increased use of mobile money platforms.
Separately, the company recovered Sh953 million linked to inflated agent commissions, down from Sh1.7 billion a year earlier. Safaricom attributed the recoveries to proactive monitoring and data analytics that helped identify irregular commission payments.
However, the report does not establish a direct link between the staff dismissals and the commission recoveries.
Besides the 118 dismissals, the telco issued three disciplinary warnings and reported 14 cases to law enforcement agencies. The firm closed the review period with 6,902 employees, with 6,616 on permanent contracts. In the previous year, it had 6,777 staff, with 6,462 on permanent terms.
The telco tied dismissals to misconduct including theft, falsification of company records, unauthorised access to customer call records or commits a criminal offence.
‘Fraud remained the most common category of concern reported through the ethics hotline in financial year 2026 and was managed through our fraud investigation processes,’ it says.
Safaricom says it identifies fraud through customer complaints or proactively using the fraud management system.
Safaricom aims to cut fraud by 90 percent saying it achieved a 82 percent reduction and recovered 46 percent of reported losses. It said proactive monitoring and analytics helped it recover Sh953 million in inflated commissions.
Interpol says mobile money fraud has become one of Africa’s most prominent cyber-enabled crimes, with 97 per cent of countries surveyed by the global police identifying it as their most common scam.
It reckons weak and inconsistent know-your-customer (KYC) procedures, coupled with the inability of some telecom operators to verify identities in real time, continue to leave mobile money users vulnerable.
Safaricom says a new technology, or the so-called Single View (View360) SIM swap platform, is helping fight the vice.
It provides Safaricom agents with a centralized dashboard to verify customer identities and safely execute telephone line replacements while flagging high-risk transactions.
‘The platform runs 18 automated pre-checks, covering roaming status, fraud location patterns, device activity, and more, handing decision-making to the system rather than frontline agents,’ says Safaricom.
‘Due to the adoption of Single View, fraudulent swaps have dropped by 65 percent, and this will drop further due to the enhancements that are in the pipeline.’
Cybersecurity remained another area of focus during the year. Safaricom said it monitored about 1.25 billion intrusion attempts and investigated more than 130,000 security events. It also mitigated distributed denial-of-service attacks without material customer impact. Safaricom is among the few Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed firms that disclose employee-led fraud.
In the banking sector, KCB Group reported that it fired 60 employees last year, up from 34 in 2025, as it stepped up its war on fraud. The lender disclosed that it wrote off Sh760,000 due to fraud and forgeries last year, compared with Sh4.5 million in 2024, according to its latest sustainability report.
Many firms have been tightening checks on workers in the wake of increased insider-led cases of fraud as many transact online.
Safaricom says it has a compliance and fraud management function that oversees legal compliance, data privacy, anti-bribery and corruption, anti-money laundering, sanctions, trade controls and telecom fraud.
During the review period, the telco carried out fraud awareness training for over 5,643 participants.