The Zimbabwe Republic Police’s Commercial Crimes Department has busted a sophisticated syndicate targeting the financial sector across the country.
The perpetrators were internal system administrators who recruited accomplices across the financial sector. These accomplices initiated requests to debit transactions and then authorized them at the recipient’s end without any validation.
Transactions were initiated and declined at One Money but were successfully credited to EcoCash using Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) and ZimSwitch platforms. The FBC trust account would then demand settlement from One Money for the unauthorized transaction.
Tawanda Zimvu and Kumbirai Mhishi have been arrested so far for this financial crime activity.
The first successful attack was against POSB Bank, where thousands of Zimbabwean dollars were siphoned from their account.
The system manipulators initiated communication nodes, sending transaction requests to debit targeted bank accounts and delivering them to recipients in messaging formats.
Tomran Investments, a company with a high number of such suspicious transactions, is under investigation. Its directors, Tawanda Zimvu and Kumbirai Mhishi, have already been arrested.
The plot was exposed when the same method was attempted against NetOne’s One Money through the ZimSwitch RTGS system. A staggering ZWD 17 million request raised red flags, and NetOne refused to settle the transaction.
One Money was requested to honor a trust account settlement for ZWD 17 million to FBC Bank, an amount far exceeding normal transactions. This triggered an alarm, and they refused to settle the request.
“Surprisingly, all the transactions were above the designated bank limits, yet the ZimSwitch gateway approved them,” revealed a source.
Prisca Tsvakai, Takuenda Gwaranda, Learnmore Gona, and Uwen Gonyora are among those currently under investigation. More arrests are expected as the police close in on the creators of this phantom money scheme.
This scheme undermines the stability of the Zimbabwean dollar and poses a threat to national security by creating artificial money that can flood the system without legitimate sources.
