Uganda ‘s leading telecoms MTN and Airtel have suffered a technical glitch on their mobile money platforms which were attacked by yet to be established hackers who made off with money estimated in trillions .
A commercial bank , Stanbic was also affected by the hacking attack which in some jurisdictions is categorized as a terrorism act on a country’s economic systems .Officials at both the giant telecoms and the commercial bank are tight lipped about the weekend events details – that led to a temporary suspension of mobile money services across networks and banking wire money transfers .
In a joint statement Anne Juuko, Wim Vanhelleputte, and VG Somasekhar, the CEOs of Stanbic Bank Uganda, MTN Uganda, and Airtel Uganda respectively, admitted there was an “incident”, but did not give details.
“Stanbic Bank Uganda, MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda inform the public and their customers that on Saturday 3 October 2020, a third-party service provider experienced a system incident which impacted Bank to Mobile Money transactions. All Bank to Mobile Money/Wallet services have since been temporarily suspended,” the statement read in part .
“This system incident has had no impact on any balances on both Bank and Mobile Money accounts. Our technical teams are analyzing the incident and will restore services as soon as possible. We apologize to all customers for any inconvenience that this has caused and reiterate our commitment to delivering seamless banking and mobile money services.”
People ‘s accounts were not directly affected by the hacking criminals but police and sister security agencies swung into action to find and apprehend the perpetuators of these heinous financial crimes .
