Financial Scams
Senior 6 · General and Religious Studies
Financial Scams
Lesson 1 of 4
24 min
Divine, a student in Huye, receives a text that looks like a mobile-money message: "You have received Frw 25,000." A minute later a stranger calls, apologetic and polite. He sent the money to the wrong number, he says, and his child's school fees are due today. Could she please send it back? She feels sorry for him and sends Frw 25,000. Only later does she check her real balance and see that no money ever arrived. The first "message" was a fake text sent from an ordinary phone number. She has paid a stranger with her own money.
This story is illustrative, but the trick is real: the Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) warns the public to be wary of a stranger who calls to say he sent money to your phone by mistake and asks for it back, and never to dial codes or enter a PIN that a caller dictates.
Definition
Financial scam: a dishonest scheme that tricks a person into handing over money, property or financial information, usually by gaining his or her trust.
Fraud: in law, obtaining another person's property by deception. Every financial scam is a form of fraud.
Social engineering: manipulating people, rather than hacking machines, so that they reveal information or act against their own interest.
Red flag: a warning sign that something may be a scam, such as pressure to act at once or a request for a PIN.
PIN and OTP: a personal identification number, and a one-time password sent by SMS to confirm a transaction. Neither should ever be shared with anyone.
Money mule: a person who lets criminals use his or her account or SIM card to receive and move stolen money, often for a small fee; this is itself a crime.
Important
Source A: Law N° 68 of 2018 determining offences and penalties in general (as published in 2018), Article 174: Fraud
"Any person who, by deception, obtains another person's property, whole or part of his/her finance by use of false names or qualifications, or who offers positive promises or who threatens of future misfortunes, commits an offence."
On conviction the penalty is imprisonment of two to three years and a fine of Frw 3,000,000 to Frw 5,000,000. If the offence involves issuing shares, bonds, securities or other cash value, the penalty rises to three to five years and a fine of more than Frw 5,000,000 and up to Frw 7,000,000.
Article 174 names the three ways scammers deceive, and they match what psychologists find:
| Lever in the law | The feeling it exploits | Example |
|---|---|---|
| "False names or qualifications" | Trust in authority | A caller claims to be from a bank, a telecom company, the police or a ministry |
| "Positive promises" | Hope and greed | A prize you never entered for, a job abroad, profits of 30% a month |
| "Threatens of future misfortunes" | Fear and urgency | "Your account will be blocked today", "your child has had an accident" |
In Divine's story the caller used a fourth lever, sympathy, and the fake text gave him false proof. Most scams follow the same pattern, shown in Figure 1.
In a survey of 1,043 users of digital financial services in October 2025, presented by the National Bank of Rwanda (BNR) with the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) in December 2025, 84% reported fraud attempts such as scam messages. RIB figures reported in May 2025 counted 12,178 fraud cases involving 14,991 suspects between 2019 and 2024. Many victims never report, out of shame, so the real number is higher.
Important
Source B: honesty in the scriptures
| Christian scripture (World English Bible) | Islamic scripture (Pickthall, 1930) |
|---|---|
| "A false balance is an abomination to Yahweh, but accurate weights are his delight." (Proverbs 11:1) | "Woe unto the defrauders: Those who when they take the measure from mankind demand it full, But if they measure unto them or weigh for them, they cause them loss." (Qur'an 83:1–3) |
Both traditions condemn cheating in trade in the strongest terms. Long before mobile money, a false weight in the market was the scam of its day.
Warning
Victims are not stupid. A common mistake is to think that only careless or uneducated people are scammed. Scams work on emotions, not on intelligence: teachers, bankers and students all fall for them when a message arrives at the right moment. Blaming victims makes them hide what happened, which helps the scammer.
Tip
Find the lever. When analysing a scam in an exam, identify the lever (authority, promise, threat, sympathy), the red flags, and the article of the law it breaks. That turns a story into an analysis.
Important
Discuss. Why do you think scammers so often pretend to be from an institution people trust, such as a bank, a telecom company or RIB itself? What does this tell us about how trust should be checked?
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the opening story (illustrative), Figure 1, the table and the exercises.
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
