NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 23 – The Director of Criminal Investigations is finalizing an investigation on a cartel that manipulates Kenya Power systems to hike bills, with several individuals set to face charges.
Those facing charges include senior and junior staff at the KPLC, brokers and some customers.
“We will have them in court soon,” he told journalists at the DCI Headquarters in Nairobi.
A team from the Serious Crime Unit has been conducting investigations on the KPLC billing system since the beginning of the year and has so far uncovered a well-coordinated cartel that has been manipulating the system to steal from unsuspecting Kenyans.
The investigations on the Post-paid and Pre-paid system started in April this year, following public outcry of hiked bills with Kenyans taking to social media to share their exaggerated bills.
The investigators partnered with the audit team from KPLC, cyber forensic experts and Criminal Intelligence Unit of the DCI Headquarters.
The fraudulent transactions have been forensically linked to KPLC employees, brokers and customers, with investigators placing KPLC ICT employees at the center of the fraud.
The investigators found out that the architecture of the fraud involved KPLC ICT employees granting unauthorized access and assigning special roles to outsiders.
The cartels will then inflate power bills or strike a deal with a client to reduce their bill for kickbacks.
One of the system administrator named by the investigators is said to have created a user who is an outsider to manipulate an account belonging to a local company to a tune of sh3.6 million at a cost of sh 1.2 million as kickback.
A general audit by KPLC indicates that Sh65 million was lost in the transactions done in 2018 alone.
On Pre-paid tokens, the investigators said they found out that rogue KPLC staff generated tokens for sale by altering genuine MPESA reference numbers with additional digits.
The KPLC audit team established that sh 35 million was lost through the Pre-paid system in 2018.
