Uganda cybersecurity conference: operators pushed to build fraud prevention into mobile money

Uganda’s telecom and banking operators came under pressure at the country’s first National Cybersecurity Conference to stop relying on customer awareness and instead build fraud prevention directly into their mobile money and digital banking products.

The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), in partnership with the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, hosted the two-day conference at the Sheraton Kampala Hotel under the theme “Securing Uganda’s Digital Future: Collaboration, Resilience and Trust,” convening telecom operators, banks, regulators and technology firms to confront rising fraud in one of Africa’s fastest-growing mobile money markets. Opening the meeting, State Minister for Information Godfrey Kabbyanga Ssebugwawo said cybersecurity must remain a shared responsibility as digital technology reshapes how Ugandans work, communicate and access services.

The clearest call to shift that responsibility onto operators came from Airtel Money Commerce Uganda Limited (AMCUL) Managing Director Japhet Aritho. Speaking on a panel on protecting digital financial services from social engineering, SIM swap fraud and account takeover, he argued the industry has leaned too heavily on public warnings and must design fraud out of its products instead.

He described the three threats not as separate crimes but as links in one chain. “For you to take over a mobile account, you have to do a SIM swap. For you to do a SIM swap, you have to start with social engineering, because there is some information that you have to pick,” he said.

Aritho said telecom operators had been fighting these attacks long before they entered mainstream debate, and pointed to a fix that began inside Airtel and is now standard across the banking sector. “We created APIs, very simple, done internally, not even by any sophisticated developer, which we exposed to all banks,” he said. Airtel Money went on to press the Bank of Uganda to require every commercial bank to adopt what is now the IMSI check API, which lets a bank confirm in real time whether a SIM swap has occurred before it clears a transaction.

He also cited Airtel’s AI Spam Alert Service, which uses data analytics to detect patterns in fraudulent SMS traffic and warn subscribers before they are caught. But he warned that fraudsters weaponise those very warnings, opening scam calls by reciting official security messaging to earn trust before steering victims into secrecy. “They will tell you exactly what we are telling them… and then they will trick you into sharing your PIN,” he said.

The stronger safeguard, Aritho said, is device binding. Recalling his own experience of being locked out of financial apps after switching phones, he said the inconvenience of re-verifying with each provider was trivial next to the cost of fraud. Airtel Money now detects when a registered device or SIM changes and freezes transactions until the account holder is re-verified, even where a scammer already holds the customer’s credentials.

He pushed back firmly against blaming victims, noting that the most effective fraudsters are fluent and disarming. “It’s very difficult to spot a scammer… they speak good English, they make you comfortable,” he said, arguing that the duty to protect belongs with providers at the design stage, not with consumers alone.

Answering an audience question on how safe personal data is once handed to a service provider, UCC Manager for Data Protection and Legal Advisory Macgyver Mugamba cited the Data Protection Act, saying customers have the right to ask any private entity how their data is handled and whether the required policies and notices exist. Complaints that go unresolved, he added, can be escalated to the Personal Data Protection Office under the Ministry of ICT.

Aritho said Uganda’s digital economy is only as safe as its weakest participant and called for sustained cooperation between telecoms, banks and regulators. “We are as strong as an ecosystem as the weakest link within that ecosystem,” he said.