The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), has dismissed claims by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), that a suspect infiltrated its system and stole voters’ personal data.
In a statement on Sunday, IEBC chairperson Wafula Chebukati refuted the allegations terming them as misleading and that the register of voters is kept in the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) System, which is hosted on several servers.
“The Commission would like to clarify that this information is not factual. The Commission’s register of voters is kept in the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) System which is hosted on several servers,” said Chebukati in a statement.
On July 16, the DCI officers reported to have arrested a suspect believed to have been operating a high-tech mobile phone scam syndicate stealing 61,617 registered voters’ details from an unnamed county in Western region.
The detectives recovered fraudulently acquired Identification (ID) cards and SIM cards belonging to Safaricom, Airtel and Telcom, which the fraudsters are said to have been using to swindle unsuspected members of the public millions of shillings.
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IEBC said that it services numerous requests by various entities requiring register of voters for specific electoral areas. IEBC said what is currently circulating in media is not data obtained through hacking of the BVR system but possibly from entities that may have legitimately obtained from the commission.
“In accordance with access to information as provided for by the Constitution, the Commission services numerous requests by various entities requiring register of voters for specific electoral areas. What is currently being reported in media is not data obtained through hacking of the BVR system,” a section of the statement read.
DCI report
According to the police, the suspect and his accomplices’ arrest followed joint operations with the Safaricom investigators after the fraudster identified as Kiprop swindled an M-Pesa agent an unspecified amount of money.
The suspect masqueraded as an M-Pesa customer care attendant lured the victim into dialing malicious codes before realizing that she had been conned.
According to a DCI report, the money was sent to an MPESA account belonging to one of the fraudulently acquired SIM cards, before being transferred to an account at Co-operative bank.
The 21-year-old suspect was arrested in Juja by sleuths from Crime Research and Intelligence Bureau, supported by Safaricom’s fraud investigations team and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) security officers and is also believed to have worked for one of the Kenya’s telco companies.
