Investigations have begun into an electronic fraud incident in Uganda leading to the loss of billions of shillings.
Unidentified hackers broke into the systems of Pegasus Technologies, a company that integrates mobile money transactions between telcos, banks, and other local, regional, and international money transfer services to steal billions of shillings.
Leading telcos, Airtel and MTN Uganda, as well as Stanbic Bank are the most affected.
In a joint statement Anne Juuko, Wim Vanhelleputte, and VG Somasekhar, the CEOs of Stanbic Bank Uganda, MTN Uganda, and Airtel Uganda respectively, admitted there was an “incident”, but did not give details.
“Stanbic Bank Uganda, MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda inform the public and their customers that on Saturday 3 October 2020, a third-party service provider experienced a system incident which impacted Bank to Mobile Money transactions.
All Bank to Mobile Money/Wallet services have since been temporarily suspended,” the trio said.
“This system incident has had no impact on any balances on both Bank and Mobile Money accounts. Our technical teams are analyzing the incident and will restore services as soon as possible.
We apologize to all customers for any inconvenience that this has caused and reiterate our commitment to delivering seamless banking and mobile money services” they said
