More than 300 MoMo fraudsters arrested this year

Sam George, the Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations, has made it clear that security agencies have arrested over 300 people this year alone for engaging in mobile money fraud. This is part of a sustained national effort to fix and improve the online money system of Ghana.

During an interview, the Minister said the arrests was done through a well-organized operation headed by the Cyber Security Authority in partnership with the Police Criminal Investigations Department and other security agencies.

He emphasized that the operation isn’t limited because it’s a requests from foreign partners such as the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is driven by Ghana’s own commitment to protect its reputation and citizens.

Mr Sam George stated that  “We’ve arrested this year alone, we’ve arrested over 300 people in collaboration with the Police CID who have been involved with Mobile Money fraud.

Mr George described that Ghana usually gets blamed for online and mobile money frauds even when those who commit the crime are foreign nationals operating within the country.

He mentioned the recent arrest of a suspect originally thought to be Ghanaian but later identified as a Nigerian national after investigations.

He said that “One of the individuals who we picked up recently about three weeks ago is a Nigerian who defrauded an elderly or roman scam artist and it was flagged as a Ghanaian operation but when we took the information and did surveillance and identified the individual and arrested the person, it turned out it wasn’t a Ghanaian it was a Nigerian who was doing this in Ghana but what happens is Ghana gets flagged for it.”

As per the Minister, the current operation are purposely aimed at criminal networks and not individuals engaged in legitimate digital work or content creation. He said cybercrime has affected the ability of Ghana to get chances to make money from global digital platforms and payment services.

Due to that he drew to attention that “We’re not going after people who are doing legitimate work we’re going after people who are giving us a bad image.”

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