Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telco, will start masking telephone numbers in M-PESA send-money notifications, limiting how a lot private information seems in transaction alerts on Kenya’s largest cellular cash platform.
The replace, which is able to go reside on the finish of March 2026, impacts the affirmation messages clients obtain after sending or receiving cash. As a substitute of displaying a full cellular quantity, the alert will now present {a partially} hidden model of the sender’s quantity.
The change targets a standard fraud tactic the place scammers gather telephone numbers from fee affirmation messages and later contact customers whereas posing as brokers, buyer care workers, or mistaken senders.
The method depends on social engineering that’s frequent in Kenya. 46% of shoppers say they’ve been focused by fraudulent calls, texts, or on-line messages, in accordance with a 2025 TransUnion report.
What clients will see in M-PESA notifications
Safaricom informed TechCabal on Friday that beneath the replace, the sender’s telephone quantity will seem in a masked format.
A quantity reminiscent of 0722123000 will seem as 0722*000** within the transaction message.
The sender’s first and second names will nonetheless seem within the notification so recipients can determine who despatched the cash.
Different particulars within the message will stay unchanged. These embody the quantity despatched, transaction code, time of the transaction, and account steadiness replace.
How clients can confirm a sender
Recipients who need to affirm the sender’s identification can nonetheless accomplish that by way of Safaricom’s verification service.
Prospects can ahead the transaction message to 334, Safaricom’s shortcode that checks whether or not the fee particulars match the corporate’s system information.
The service returns a message confirming whether or not the transaction is legitimate.
Why Safaricom is masking telephone numbers
The change limits how simply telephone numbers may be copied from M-PESA alerts and reused.
Fraudsters usually gather numbers from transaction messages and later use them to try scams or ship undesirable messages.
Masking the digits reduces the quantity of non-public info shared in on a regular basis transactions. It additionally aligns with information minimisation, a privateness precept that requires corporations to show solely the private info essential for a service to perform.
M-PESA handles billions of shillings in transactions day by day throughout Kenya, which means even small adjustments to transaction alerts can have an effect on how hundreds of thousands of consumers work together with the service.
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