Friday, November 12, 2010

Rewards Galore

All of a sudden everywhere I look, Kenyans are being offered some sort of rewards, 500K, 50K, 10K, 1M, 5M name it. and the reason for the reward? sending a blank sms! just go to your phone and send an SMS. its some sort of lottery they say  and i keep on wondering if our good old betting control and licensing board have licensed all these and also to run right at the same time. On the face it looks like a copy of the recent one where one Kenyan ponyokad with a range rover worth 11 million (so they said). You know in Kenya we copy , fast! But looking at it even deeper one cant help but see a well planned effort to neutralize safaricom's masonko promotion. Well i can think that now that there are reports of sabotage on their network.

Deeper still this thing reminds one of the run away nation wide fraud of 2007 when Kenyans lost millions in pyramid scams. At the time pyramids were springing from all over. Every other corner had a scheme and due to laxity of the regulatory authorities Kenyans lost quite a bit. Again this time the regulators seem to be asleep in a way and before we know it, these win this win that schemes where only a simple sms is required shall have destroyed the still recovering economy of ours.

4 comments:

  1. finally you get to remember that you had a blog :)

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  2. Think of it this way, one sms costs 60 bob, say five hundred thousand guys text that's a cool 30 million. Even if you give someone 1 million do the math and see all the profit they rake in. and, they tell you the more time you sms the more your chances- as if.
    Plus its the tv stations who are running the adverts so there are no advertising costs.
    seriously, this is as as good a scam as they go.

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  3. i don't think they are targeted at Safaricom, they are simple money makers for the promoters (in fact safaricom makes money from all of them by virtue of its customer base)

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  4. Am quite surprised but we should take advantage of such

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