Kenyans generally have a love for free things, it is just that they lack an opportunity to land their hands on such. This was very evident when the Safaricom data billing system suffered a technical fault. The fault allowed subscribers to redeem data bundles for free using Bonga Points which is a customer loyalty reward scheme.
Peeps were able to get the free data and minutes when they used the USSD menu for data *544# which enabled them to get free data bundles via the Platinum menu using ‘free’ bonga points.
Go and buy Monthly bundles via bonga points…Safaricom is experiencing a glitch pic.twitter.com/9tZGv1Uwat
— LATIPH◾ (@latiphyarrow) June 28, 2019
Soon after social media was awash with peeps bragging about how they were able to get huge amounts of data from the telco with some considering it to be payback time.
I hope y’all did to Safaricom what they do to us daily … before they mended their systems. Now I’m a hotspot???#SafaricomSystemsDown #SafaricomFreeStuff pic.twitter.com/YyEU9zxyqT
— Lightskin Papi?? (@its_nduati) June 28, 2019
The telco after realizing that their system had a glitch, first disabled the Platinum Services on the *544# USSD code. Thereafter they started recovering the data that had been acquired illegally must to the surprise of the beneficiaries.
I had 66gb.. Safcom have recovered the@ all.. All I was getting was msgs za kuRenew sms kumbe bundles zinakuwa recovered ????? pic.twitter.com/5F0PAdcnxJ
— AbdulCollo (@AbdulCollo) June 28, 2019
A story had started going around that the telco would recover the misappropriated data from people Mpesa balances. However, the telco clarified that they will recover the same from future data purchases and not from Mpesa.
I really don’t know why people assumed that the telco would not take action to recover the stolen data being that it was such an embarrassing situation for them not to mention the financial loss.