If by any chance you find yourself in such a situation this post will guide you through on how you can successfully reverse your money. Kindly read through to find how.
Since it's inception, Mpesa has revolutionized the way we carry out financial transactions not only in Kenya but in the entire world with the introduction of various similar mobile money platforms in a number of countries as well as linking with various online money platforms including western Union, PayPal among others.
While you can now send money across the globe from the comfort of your living room with just a few clicks, sending money to a wrong recipient can be quite frustrating.
But what is even more taunting is the fact that within a blink of an eye you could have lost your money just like that as a result of Keying in one or two wrong digits.
While there's a law that protects you against people who refuse to refund a wrong Mpesa transaction, sometimes the money might not be worth starting a long legal journey that could in the long run see you spent more than what you had initially lost.
This is a fact that many online conmen are fully aware of and that's why many of them target money less than Ksh.1,000 and in most cases even Ksh.200 is a good catch for them.
While that of conmen can be another scenario, what if you mistakenly buy airtime while your intention was to actually send the money?
This is a situation I found myself in a few days ago while trying to send a friend of mine some money. I accidentally bought airtime for the number instead.
I was shocked to see the M-Pesa confirmation Message instead of the akikisha notification, and immediately knew I was in for a long battle to try and reverse the money, if that option still did work.
While still pondering which was the best and easiest way to reverse the money I got a call from the recipient and I told him to old on while I contacted Safaricom to effect the reversal.
Being a tech blogger who has written extensively about the Telecommunications space in the country, I was confident that I would successfully reverse this erroneous transaction within the shortest time possible.
My first step was to send the entire Mpesa SMS to 456, but from past experiences I knew this was an exercise in futility, since despite the airtime that Safaricom has given the M-Pesa SMS reversal, it seems not to work.
The next logical step was to therefore call customer care to inform them about the transaction and see if they could do the reversal from their end.
Being a prepay subscriber, I dialled 100 and after various attempts I could not reach a customer care. I was even surprised to learn that they had withdrawn the human customer supt and opted for zuri, a chat boot and other social media options.
Without loosing hope I friend this zuri guy both on my Safaricom app and WhatsApp.
Despite the WhatsApp version responding faster, I also realised that this is just a chat version of the 100 call and still ended up notifying me to send the erroneous Mpesa SMS to 456
With frustrations building up, and after calling my friend that I would send him another amount so that he could resend me the airtime, I decided to give one more shot at the social media, and decide to go for Facebook.
With so many Safaricom pages, I could not immediately pick the right one, and finally settled on Safaricom PLC page with the screenshot below.
My first concern was to see if they could give me a channel that I could reach out to a human customer representative, and when they replied that they were there to assist I decided to tell them about my situation, after all I had given hope in the reversal.
After waiting for some minutes they requested for the transaction code which I dutifully gave them, and to my utter surprise they effected the reversal.
The comments on a post I had earlier posted is a clear indication of the trouble that many people go through every time the make an erroneous Mpesa transaction, and the feeling of helplessness that this leave them is quite too much.
From my experience above, we can draw some useful lessons that could be of help in case you also find yourself in almost a similarly situation.
Follow these steps to effect an erroneous Mpesa transaction:
While you can now send money across the globe from the comfort of your living room with just a few clicks, sending money to a wrong recipient can be quite frustrating.
But what is even more taunting is the fact that within a blink of an eye you could have lost your money just like that as a result of Keying in one or two wrong digits.
While there's a law that protects you against people who refuse to refund a wrong Mpesa transaction, sometimes the money might not be worth starting a long legal journey that could in the long run see you spent more than what you had initially lost.
This is a fact that many online conmen are fully aware of and that's why many of them target money less than Ksh.1,000 and in most cases even Ksh.200 is a good catch for them.
While that of conmen can be another scenario, what if you mistakenly buy airtime while your intention was to actually send the money?
This is a situation I found myself in a few days ago while trying to send a friend of mine some money. I accidentally bought airtime for the number instead.
I was shocked to see the M-Pesa confirmation Message instead of the akikisha notification, and immediately knew I was in for a long battle to try and reverse the money, if that option still did work.
While still pondering which was the best and easiest way to reverse the money I got a call from the recipient and I told him to old on while I contacted Safaricom to effect the reversal.
Being a tech blogger who has written extensively about the Telecommunications space in the country, I was confident that I would successfully reverse this erroneous transaction within the shortest time possible.
My first step was to send the entire Mpesa SMS to 456, but from past experiences I knew this was an exercise in futility, since despite the airtime that Safaricom has given the M-Pesa SMS reversal, it seems not to work.
The next logical step was to therefore call customer care to inform them about the transaction and see if they could do the reversal from their end.
Being a prepay subscriber, I dialled 100 and after various attempts I could not reach a customer care. I was even surprised to learn that they had withdrawn the human customer supt and opted for zuri, a chat boot and other social media options.
Without loosing hope I friend this zuri guy both on my Safaricom app and WhatsApp.
Despite the WhatsApp version responding faster, I also realised that this is just a chat version of the 100 call and still ended up notifying me to send the erroneous Mpesa SMS to 456
With frustrations building up, and after calling my friend that I would send him another amount so that he could resend me the airtime, I decided to give one more shot at the social media, and decide to go for Facebook.
With so many Safaricom pages, I could not immediately pick the right one, and finally settled on Safaricom PLC page with the screenshot below.
My first concern was to see if they could give me a channel that I could reach out to a human customer representative, and when they replied that they were there to assist I decided to tell them about my situation, after all I had given hope in the reversal.
After waiting for some minutes they requested for the transaction code which I dutifully gave them, and to my utter surprise they effected the reversal.
The comments on a post I had earlier posted is a clear indication of the trouble that many people go through every time the make an erroneous Mpesa transaction, and the feeling of helplessness that this leave them is quite too much.
From my experience above, we can draw some useful lessons that could be of help in case you also find yourself in almost a similarly situation.
Follow these steps to effect an erroneous Mpesa transaction:
- Imediately send the transaction sms to 456. Ensure that you don't delete these two messages.
- Call the wrong recipient and notify them if the wrong transaction. If kind enough they will refund the money.
- If you bought airtime instead of sending the money, kindly tell the person not to use any part of that airtime otherwise the reversal might never work.
- Don't waste your time trying to call 100, it will still rever you to step number one.
- Contact Safaricom PLC trough their social media platforms and they will advice you further.
Hope this article will be of help to many, and in case you successful reverse your erroneous Mpesa transfer after reading this or know of better ways that can be of benefit to many kindly let us know on the comments section below.
Comments
Post a Comment