A woman was recently left in shock after her attempts to apply for a bank loan were denied, with the banks stating that she had defaulted on a mobile loan and had been listed on Credit Reference Bureau (CRB).
The Daily Nation Newspaper on Monday, September 23, reported that the woman was perplexed when the grounds on which she had been denied the loan were made clear to her, and asked for more details as she could not recall ever taking the alleged loan.
Her complaints prompted the bank to check her records and show her evidence of the transaction and her failure to honour the debt.
On seeing the number, the woman reported that she immediately learned that her former housemaid had taken the loan using a sim card registered in her name and had failed to pay.
She alleged that when she contracted the culprit to help in the household duties, she did not own a phone or a sim card and thus being a good employer, she bought the maid a phone and registered the SIM card in her name for ease of communication.
The housemaid had then gone ahead and taken a loan, and after failing to repay, the lender billed the default charges to the owner of the sim card, and after their warnings went unheeded, they listed her in the CRB.
She added that the saddest part was that she only learned of that error long after the housemaid had left and there was no avenue for her to get answers.
Her confessions on social media are reported to have opened Pandora's box with many other users opening up to having been through similar experiences.
Many told of having to pay off loans that they did not take simply because someone registered their sim cards using their IDs or simply because they lent their phones to others.
Anthony Muiyuro, a cybersecurity expert, weighing in on the issue, warned people against registering someone else's sim cards using their IDs.
"Mobile subscribers face serious legal and financial risks by exposing themselves to the dangers associated with losing track of the sim cards or giving them away to others," he warned.
