Weird, random SMS popping up from M-Shwari, banks, hospitals, even the Judiciary – did you get one too?

Yesterday, my wife showed me one of the strangest text messages I’ve ever seen. It came from Safaricom’s M-Shwari, but the contents looked nothing like a balance alert, loan reminder, or promotional message. Instead, it was a chaotic cocktail of numbers, random letters, special symbols, and what looked like keyboard rage from an alien trying to type in Greek.

For a split second, I thought Safaricom had been hacked or someone had finally decided to take revenge from the inside after being fired. Yes, Safaricom recently fired 113 employees in a SIM swap fraud crackdown, so forgive my not-so-wild imagination. But when I checked online, it became clear we weren’t alone. Kenyans on social media were posting similar screenshots, only it wasn’t just Safaricom. Some said they got these scrambled texts from Co-operative Bank, Judiciary, Gertrude’s Hospital, and other unrelated organizations.

Here’s the weirdest bit: I didn’t receive any. My wife did. So it’s clearly not affecting everyone.

So what exactly was this SMS sorcery? Well, while no official explanation has been issued yet, there are a few plausible technical scenarios that could explain it.

One possibility is an encoding or decoding glitch, where bulk SMS systems using formats like GSM-7, Unicode, or UTF-8 experience a misconfiguration or bad conversion, causing the message to arrive as gibberish. Think of it like someone writing you a message in Kiswahili but your phone insisting on reading it in Japanese. Another is a hiccup from a bulk SMS aggregator; since banks, hospitals, and government institutions use shared gateways, a single system failure could scramble messages across multiple organizations.

It could also be the result of corrupt transmission or a system update gone sideways, where data gets mangled during maintenance or version changes, turning normal texts into Matrix-like gibberish. And, just maybe, someone accidentally pushed internal test messages to real users, which would explain the randomness and lack of formatting.

Now over to you!

Did you receive one of these bizarre texts? From Safaricom? Co-op? Judiciary? A hospital? Or some random shortcode? What time did it come in? And which network are you on?

Drop a comment or send a screenshot, because while it looks like encrypted spy communication, it’s probably just a bulk SMS system having a bad day.

Meanwhile, I’m still low-key side-eyeing my wife’s phone like it’s hiding government secrets.