Police in Uganda has Friday afternoon charged a 30-year-old Alvin Mugerwa following allegations he fraudulently accessed a mobile money transfer service and took Shs10.4billion.
In October this year, unknown hackers broke into the system of Pegasus Technologies before taking off with an unspecified amount of money belonging to several companies including banks and telecos.
Pegasus Technologies is a company that translates money from banks into mobile money transfers between banks and telecom companies.
Following investigations, it was discovered that the hackers used over 2000 mobile phone numbers to execute their mission and that the heist took more than two days without notice of the financial systems involved.
Police swung into action and arrested two people with Electronic Fraud and Theft to Buganda Road Court having been caught with the telephone lines that were used to transact mobile money withdraws, and were remanded to Kitalya government prisons.
However, in a statement, Friday, police confirmed that Mugerwa has been charged to court for Unauthorized Access C/S 12(11), &11(7) and Access with intent to commit or facilitate the commission of a further offence C/S 13 of the Computer Misuse Act 2011.
“It is alleged that Mugerwa Alvin who is an employee of Stanbic Bank Uganda as well as an External Consultant/System’s Administrator with Pegasus Technologies between July 2020 and October 2020 having an access to Pegasus fraudulently manipulated it’s system thereby causing loss of the substantial amount of money through Mobile money transactions. (UGX.10,441,000,000/=),”a statement from Police CID reads in part.
Our investigators have since established this was an organized crime, that involved about 1630 Telecom sim cards from both MTN and Airtel that were fraudulently registered and later used to withdraw cash from various Mobile money Agents across the country especially in Greater Kampala and major towns,” the statement continues.
Police said they will continue investigating this matter especially to establish the involvement of employees of the Telecom companies that fraudulently registered the sim cards well knowing that their act was to enable fraud.
