Safaricom dismissed 118 employees over fraud in the financial year that ended on 31st March 2026, five more than the 113 it let go the year before. The figures are in its 2026 Sustainable Business Report, published on 27th October 2026, which covers the parts of the business the annual accounts don’t, such as ethics and staff.
Safaricom also reported 14 cases to law enforcement agencies, up from seven, and issued three disciplinary warnings after issuing none the year before. In all, it investigated 118 fraud cases over the twelve months. The count covers Safaricom’s business in Kenya only, so Safaricom Ethiopia’s staff aren’t in it.
For anyone with a Safaricom line or an M-PESA account, the first question is what these employees were doing, and whether any of it touched customers. This year’s report doesn’t say. It gives the three totals and nothing under them: no split by type of fraud, no figure for the money involved, and nothing on which teams or shops the dismissed staff worked in. It also doesn’t explain how 118 cases produced 118 dismissals and three warnings, which suggests some cases involved more than one employee.
What last year’s breakdown showed
The 2025 report did split its cases. Of the 113 investigated in the year to March 2025, all of which ended in dismissal, 57 were breaches of policy and procedure or unauthorised access to systems, 47 were SIM swap cases and nine were asset misappropriation. That last one is Safaricom’s term for staff taking what isn’t theirs: cash, stock, data bundles, overtime pay or Bonga loyalty points.
The SIM swap number is the one customers should care about most. A SIM swap moves your phone number onto a new SIM card. It exists so you can get your number back when you lose your phone, but whoever holds the number also receives every one-time password and M-PESA alert sent to it. That’s why a swap done for a fraudster can be the first step to emptying a wallet or a bank account. When an employee is in on it, the person meant to run the identity checks is the one getting round them.
INTERPOL estimates Kenyans lost USD 3.8 million to SIM swap fraud in 2025, as we reported in August. That’s about KES 494 million at KES 129.9 to the dollar, the rate on 28th October 2026. And in June the High Court upheld a ruling that made Safaricom carry 60% of the KES 4.4 million taken from one customer after her line was fraudulently swapped through an M-PESA agent.
How Safaricom finds a case
A case starts in one of two ways: a customer complains, or Safaricom’s fraud management system flags it. The company also runs yearly reviews of its main processes to check whether fraud has happened inside them. A manager or the Ethics and Compliance team then investigates, and a disciplinary committee decides the outcome under the company’s disciplinary policy. Dismissal is for gross misconduct, which the report lists as including theft, falsifying company records, unauthorised access to customer call records, breaking security and compliance rules, leaking confidential information and committing a criminal offence.
So the complaint you make about a swap you didn’t ask for is one of the ways an inside job gets found. Safaricom says its 333 line now routes about 1,500 fraud complaints a month straight to the teams that resolve them.
How is a swap approved without the owner? We need answers!
Fraud was again the most common concern raised through Safaricom’s anonymous ethics hotline, and the case count has grown for four years running. Safaricom investigated 28 cases in the year to March 2022, 33 in 2023, 103 in 2024, 113 in 2025 and 118 in 2026. The big jump came in the year to March 2024. For scale, 118 dismissals is about one in every 50 of the 5,939 people Safaricom employed in Kenya at the end of March, counting permanent and fixed-term staff.
Then there’s the fraud aimed at customers. On Safaricom’s own figures, fraud incidents fell 82% during the year against a target of 90%, and it recovered 46% of the money customers reported losing. Safaricom doesn’t say what the 82% is measured from. In-person scams, where fraudsters talk people into handing over details or money face to face, were the biggest single source. Separately, Safaricom recovered KES 953 million linked to inflated commissions paid to M-PESA agents. The report doesn’t connect that money to the dismissed staff.
On SIM swaps, Safaricom cut the pre-checks for a swap from 21 clicks to four, automated 18 fraud and compliance checks and added biometric verification. It also brought SIM swaps back to its franchise shops, the ones partners run under the Safaricom name. They now handle about 140,000 swaps a month, and Safaricom says fraud there fell from around 20 incidents a month to fewer than five.
Dismissing 118 people shows the checks are catching insiders, and Safaricom deserves credit for publishing the number at all. But a total on its own doesn’t tell its 41.68 million M-PESA customers how many of this year’s cases involved swapping someone’s line. Last year’s report answered that, and this year’s should have too.
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