Safaricom dismissed 118 employees for fraud in the financial year ended March 2026, a rise of 4.4 per cent from the 113 dismissals recorded in the previous year.

The company also issued three disciplinary warnings and referred 14 cases to law-enforcement agencies, double the number referred in the year to March 2025.

Safaricom investigated 118 fraud cases during the year, with fraud remaining the most common category reported through its ethics hotline.

The telco reported an 82 per cent reduction in fraud incidents against a target of 90 per cent and recovered 46 per cent of reported fraud losses.

Proactive monitoring and analytics helped recover KSh953 million linked to inflated agent commissions, down from KSh1.7 billion a year earlier.

Social engineering was identified as the leading fraud threat to customers, with in-person social engineering the most significant contributor.

Ethics awareness reached 98 per cent of employees, matching the previous year, and an Ethics and Fraud Awareness Week involved the chief executive and senior leadership alongside an International Anti-Corruption Day campaign.

Awareness broadcasts to M-PESA agents increased to 37 from 11, while 141 suppliers received know-your-customer and ethics training, down from 246, and 339 dealers and 972 agents were covered.

Safaricom detected approximately 1.25 billion intrusion attempts and investigated more than 130,000 security events, reporting no material cybersecurity breaches and successful mitigation of distributed denial-of-service attacks.

The company’s security and privacy management systems are certified to ISO 27001, ISO 27701, PCI DSS and GSMA Mobile Money standards, and it is preparing for ISO 42001 certification.

The Board Risk and ESG Committee oversees digital trust, and privacy trust scores rose to 70 per cent for M-PESA (from 63 per cent) and 61 per cent for Safaricom overall (from 56 per cent).

At the end of the review period Safaricom employed 6,902 staff, of whom 6,616 were on permanent contracts, compared with 6,777 staff and 6,462 permanent contracts in the prior year.

Dismissals were tied to misconduct such as theft, falsification of company records, unauthorised access to customer call records or other criminal offences.

“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,” the report said.

Safaricom also highlighted its Single View (View360) SIM-swap platform, which runs 18 automated pre-checks and has reduced fraudulent swaps by 65 per cent, with further reductions expected.

Interpol reported that Kenyans lost KSh491.6 million to SIM-swap fraud, noting a 327 per cent surge in such scams last year.