Safaricom dismissed 118 employees over fraud in the financial year that ended on 31 March 2026, five more than the 113 it let go the year before. The figure is in the company's 2026 Sustainable Business Report, published on 27 October, according to Tech-ish and TechMoran. It covers Safaricom's business in Kenya only.
The company also referred 14 cases to law enforcement agencies, up from seven, and issued three disciplinary warnings after issuing none a year earlier. It investigated 118 fraud cases in total.
What the report leaves out
This year's report gives the totals and nothing beneath them: no split by type of fraud, no figure for the money involved and nothing on where the dismissed staff worked, Tech-ish reports. Last year's report did break its 113 cases down: 57 were breaches of policy or unauthorised access to systems, 47 were SIM swap cases and nine were staff taking company assets.
SIM swaps matter most to customers. Whoever controls a phone number receives its one-time passwords and M-PESA alerts, so a swap done for a fraudster can be the first step to emptying a wallet. In June, Kenya's High Court upheld a ruling that made Safaricom carry 60% of the KSh4.4 million taken from one customer after her line was swapped through an M-PESA agent, Tech-ish reports.
Related · AI and Tech StakM-PESA Goes Down a Day After Safaricom's Trust ReportM-PESA failed across Kenya from about 2am on 28 October, a day after Safaricom's chief executive called digital trust a leadership issue.A number that keeps climbing
- Cases investigated have risen four years running: 28 in the year to March 2022, 33 in 2023, 103 in 2024, 113 in 2025 and 118 in 2026, according to Tech-ish.
- 118 dismissals is about one in 50 of the 5,939 people Safaricom employed in Kenya at the end of March.
- Fraud was again the most common concern raised through the company's ethics hotline, TechMoran reports.
On customer fraud, Safaricom says incidents fell 82% during the year against a target of 90%, and that it recovered 46% of the money customers reported losing. It also says monitoring helped it recover KSh953 million linked to inflated agent commissions; the report does not tie that sum to the dismissed staff, TechMoran notes.
The stakes are large. M-PESA had 41.7 million customers active in a 30-day period and processed 46.4 billion transactions worth KSh41.7 trillion in the year, according to the same report.
