Nokia Hit By SMS and Email Lottery Scam

Global handsets maker advises users not to respond to dubious messages

Kampala, Uganda, 1^st February 2011: World’s leading handsets maker, Nokia, has warned mobile phone users over the re-emergence of a scam suggesting that people have won money or mobile phones, which in reality, is an attempt to get private information from people who reply to the messages.

The hoaxers previously used to send to the dubious information to email addresses telling people they had won a Nokia device. This scam has now moved on and is being sent out to mobiles phones via SMS, with the message suggesting people have won a free Nokia, and just need to provide their bank details to claim the free phone.

 “We have been receiving a number of reports recently that scam artists are sending out hoax SMS and emails, purportedly from Nokia, that offer some sort of money if one were to respond in a similar way that lotteries are run. We would like to clarify that, those messages are not coming from Nokia and that we do not do money lotteries. We are asking people to beware and know that this ‘lottery’ is a scam,” said Kenneth Oyolla, Nokia, General Manager, East and Southern Africa.

 “Our advice is that if you do receive something dubious like this, DO NOT reply to these messages or pass them on. The thing to do is to delete the message without responding. You might also consider contacting the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) to report such hoax messages,” said Mr Oyolla.

He added: “We continue to remind people that bank details should never be given to strangers, particularly if all you know about that person is a contact mobile number and nothing else. If you haven’t entered any competition, or if the prize looks too good to be true, then it almost certainly will be. Let’s have a safe 2011.”

How the Nokia Lottery scam works

There are a couple of methods these scammers use, in the hope of stealing your money.

Method 1: A mobile phone user will receive an email claiming they have been chosen at random, to receive a prize, usually a large figure of money. In this case, £350,000 is the prize. However, to receive winnings the mobile phone user is informed he/she must send them some money as an admin charge. £650 in this same case. They hope you’ll be so dazzled by the large sum of money they claim you have won, that you will send the administration fee. It is at this point you will never hear from them again and your money will be lost.

Method 2: This is commonly used through contacting a mobile phone user by SMS. These text messages will tell you you’ve won a heap of money, like in this case, but you must first phone a telephone number or email back to hand over your bank details. Do not do this. Never give your bank details to a stranger, especially if all you know about them is their mobile phone number.

Whatever method they use, they will be asking for the same thing. Either your bank account details, or some money in another form and the messages they send always look official, but they’re not. They’re fake.

Examples of hoax emails and SMS circulating:

Hoax claim: Free Nokia mobiles

“Nokia Is Giving Away Phones For “FREE”!! Nokia is trying word-of-mouth advertising to introduce its products. And the reward you receive for advertising for them is a phone free of cost!”

Hoax claim: Nokia mobile Promo

“In line with the commemorating event marking our 142nd anniversary we rolled out over £ nnnnn (n Million Great Britain Pounds) for our 142nd Anniversary Draws. All participants were selected through a computer ballot system drawn from 25,000 company mobile numbers, and 30,000,000 individual mobile numbers from the 45 mobile networks from Australia, New Zealand, North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa as part of International Promotions Program, which is conducted annually in Britain, London.

This promo is approved by the British Gaming Board and also licensed by the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR). This promo is the 1st of its kind and we intend to sensitize the public. To begin the verification process of your prize, you are required to fill and send the claims form below.”

What to do if you receive a Nokia Lottery scam SMS or email

Don’t respond to the messages

The Bank, Competitions & Awards

What have I been up to? Well, a lot apparently.

On Thursday 12^th I was invited on behalf of Speakers Without Borders to attend a stakeholder workshop hosted by the Bank of Uganda on rolling out a National Financial Literacy and Consumer Protection Education Policy to provide insights gained from working among young people on how to approach “these things”. Basically, the “banks are fucking the consumers” and we need to tell people to avoid getting well, screwed. The discussion ranged from simple things like the cooling off period between loan applications and funds disbursement to the glaring gap in the report on how to actively engage and sustain the financial literacy discussion among the young adults in Uganda despite the sheer weight they exert on the demographic tables.  Also there are over 150,000 Ugandans on Face book. Most of those are not my parents’ age. So, why not?  Use everything available as long as they are getting the message. I gave my two cents there.

On Friday the 13^th, I was invited by Mambo Guy, an old buddy who I’ve known for forever, President of the The Lantern Meet, connoisseur of fine things, and architect - to attend the Final presentation of Kitenge Spaces. This cat is really smooth. About a year ago he won a grant from The Youth Action Fund under the auspices of the Open Society Institute (EA) to run a competition for architecture students to design Afro-centric spaces. His belief that architecture is culture and therefore a reflection of our common identity is a debate that’s raged on over the years between him and I. Basically because I think that the spiel that spaces define people is academic hogwash but rather that people define the spaces they live in. Anyway over the course of a year he has had the contestants design and submit objects and space designs to a panel of young and rather erudite architects. This competition is Kitenge Spaces.

Mambo Guy

"Just as a noun is only a noun if it possesses a “verbal companion,” a house is not a house unless it has a proper primary function, from which it will derive its spirit. So the house gives, and the house takes, but the house cannot be unless needs qualify it... like a genie that one summons out of a lamp, to answer to ones needs."

Yesterday, as I sat at the National Theatre and listened to a young man talk about the communality of the African meal and why, that, of all spaces, should be the most well lit space in the house, I knew that Guy had done it. He’d come from where 3 of us sat 5 years ago and talked about being “that man” and taken the road. “That man” is the guy who does not take what he is given, but rather will consistently, infect, affect and effect everything around him with change; constantly saying “NO! This isn’t enough” and asking for more soup, re-defining his own boundaries, pushing the horizon a little further and, without knowing it, making the lives of many, many people mean so much more. Now the world has to watch out. He is coming.

Later in the evening I attended the Public Relations Association of Uganda (PRAU) Excellence Awards Dinner where they were awarding the best PR campaigns, practitioners, companies, agencies and organizations. In what was an almost serendipitous occasion, URA swept three awards all in the corporate communications category, The “ONE LOVE” Campaign by ZK Advertising for UHMG (the “sexual network” campaign for those of you who don’t know it yet) was voted the Overall Best Campaign of 2009/2010. I for one was happy because having personally worked on the submissions for  and designed the communication materials for two of the winning entries –Best Event PR, The Johnnie Walker Launch in Uganda (covered aptly in this post here but also very well taken care of by Google. Hehe!), and the Best Crisis Management Award for President Lager - a Uganda breweries product that was interdicted right before Christmas last year by Nile Breweries from bottling the product in a long neck bottle.

Cheers catch up later!

Be There

The First Uganda National Spelling Bee has come!

 

The FUNS Bee Competition is an exciting contest in which secondary school students all over Uganda will compete in spelling English words. Though wildly popular in many countries worldwide, it is a novelty in Uganda. The competition will involve thousands of secondary school teenagers from Senior 1 to 3 from all parts of the country competing in a national English spelling competition based on important social issues.

The thrilling competition will be watched on television by millions of Ugandans throughout this year. In addition to being televised, the contest will involve millions of Ugandans including parents, teachers, students and the general public through interactive radio commercials, newspaper coverage and supplements and an interactive online dimension through our website, www.funsbee.com.

 Hosted live by literary giants and committed educators, the bee presents an exciting opportunity for the flawed educational and grammatical vagaries of the third world. 

But first, come for the launch party on the 17th of July 2010 at the Troth Group in Bugolobi. Barbeque, drinks, spelling and fun!

Nokia reaching out to developers in Uganda; Part 1 of a loaded story.

Yesterday, in a room packed full of journalists and the able members of the Kampala blogsphere, the able, beautiful Dorthy Ooko presented and unveiled Nokia's latest product; NOKIA OVI; for publishers.

Journalists being who they are sat quietly  through her talk but the bloggers and techies were clearly in a state. The guy from the Google Technology User Group Uganda [who looks like Matt Damon but is actually called Kyle] was wondering about licensing and technology compatibility while Revence was worried about control, content and how long a developer's application takes to go through the verification, certification and validation processes in order to star earning his developer's cash!

The journalists wondered whether this was not going to trigger another war in a market where Nokia is a dominant player and neither Apple nor Google have the set up structures to compete in User generated content management and application development. The latter two have made hundreds of developers worldwide wealthy by providing platforms on which they could develop applications for their different products and be remunerated by royalties paid from usage/purchase or downloads. 

This in many markets has meant that applications virtually for everything have been developed to assist users in their day to day lives; from the ovulation calendar to shazam; an app that will tell you the name, album, artiste, year  and number of any song  just by listening to the beats in that song. Obviously creating millionaires out of the truly brilliant designers. 

Another truth is that a lot of these products were either not designed for the African market [now often referred to as the Middle East and Africa market], therefore resulting in:

a) A lot of African designers not being able to design the apps they need to find  bags, shoes, cheap beer, and cheap affordable food  or housing for the communities in which they live.

b) They have inadvertently missed out on the billions  of shillings that are there to be made from worldwide consumption of their applications.

And in the new world of marketing  where you flex  your muscles where it hurts Nokia has flexed its biceps. Every day, more than 1.2 billion people connect to one another with a Nokia device – from mobile phones to advanced smartphones and high-performance mobile computers. you imagine that kind of power, usage subscription and loyalty and you tell me its not going to hurt. the naysayers will argue that people in Africa don't have the money to sustain the Apple and Google market sizes but these guys at Makerere will say different, or the guys at Appfrica, or the guys at Node Six.

Their argument is that if you continue to go where the money is, you miss the bigger "share of heart" that stands to be gained from the masses. this is mainly because these masses, eat, they work, they clothe, they dream and live; therefore they communicate; which is why new market analysis will tell you that the people are where you go, not the money.

Whether this is Nokia's objective or not is yet to be ascertained but one thing is for sure, the support that Nokia has now committed to offer developers is an almost unprecedented first; offering the OVI platform as a place for all consumers to be able to get their email, music,  share work, games, mapping and navigation capabilities. This will undoubtedly lead to an increase in the amount of local content online; the god of which i have discussed before in previous posts here. check it more out here.

And of course open up the possibility of having the first Ugandan billionaire software developer whose software will probably be published and sold online.

Download the statement/ news release here

Thought Leadership: The Game is changing.

Uganda, the land of milk and honey, corruption and money. A beautiful kaleidoscopic picture of zen view sunsets and the gory dod-eat-dog world of modern-day capitalism. To the naked eye, the country is preparing for elections in 2011 but to the trained eye the powers that be are in anarchy.

Over the past few weeks there have been relatively few ads in the newspapers. Well this is what has been going on…

A couple of months ago all the media houses in Uganda got together and decided that agencies who book, sell, and plan media buying for the corporate machine owed them too much money and therefore they were going to stop running all adverts. They called a meeting to talk about this and they were right; agencies and clients together owed the media houses a whopping [Red Pepper style] UGX 5.9 Billion! They gave the agencies, who foolishly agreed, 90 days in which to address the delicate matter with their respective clients and get back to them. 

 90 days later.

A couple of weeks ago Robert “KaBush” (from here on known as Bush), summoned the mother of all meetings, he and his Nation Media Group counterpart Dr. Githinji (did you know he was a gynecologist?) had amassed all their smaller and diverse media cronies and, seated at the head of the table, announced that all advertising was going to stop running. They had done what scholars and industry watchers had thought was unthinkable, let alone undoable. They had blacklisted all media agencies; a blanket ban.
The review meeting following this announcement showed that the agencies had managed to bring down their debt to about UGX 2.9 Billion claiming that some of their clients were adamant to pay or had stricter payment procedures and therefore had not been able to remit the balance in the 90 days pending. So all advertising was going off air.

He shouldn’t have

One, been positioned as the leader of the fight against the corporate machine because that evening nearly all MDs, CEOs, and CFOs of the corporate machine met separately to discuss this new turn of events while simultaneously the agencies also met to digest this new twist to things.

Two, put a blanket ban on the all the agencies because not all agencies had failed to pay. Therefore the whole industry being victimized for one agency’s lack of fiduciary wisdom was not perceived as just or bright.

Three, stood together with his competition to try and “Enforce” a measure that he felt was for the “greater good” because in the end he will still be standing alone to his shareholders to account for what’s happening to their investments.

The results of the meetings.

The Bush meeting ended up with an alliance signed in blood committing all the media houses to a cooperation where if you owe any single media house money e.g. Observer, you will not get be able to run your advertisement in any other newspaper. Of course this would mean increased cooperation amongst the media houses but it also posed the precarious question of commitment and solidarity. In a time when the market is shrinking and print media budgets are quickly being replaced you don’t want to be caught biting the advertisers’ hand. 45 extra days were given and ZK Advertising, the second largest spender of advertising in East Africa 2009 and Ignition were blacklisted. All their advertising was blocked and no work would be coming through them from anyone. Instead, the media houses circumvented the agencies and went directly to the clients and got the adverts directly.
The MDs and CEO meeting resulted in reimbursement bills to their secretaries for coffees and networking time spent discussing “industry re-formation”. They all however agreed that what Bush had done was undesirable and they would have to find a way of punishing the bad boy for his behaviour. “Let’s pull all our advertising from him”, someone whispered, but just like the whisper, he was asked to speak quietly because they all needed Bush.

The agency meeting yielded slightly more than the above because they ended up forming something called the Agencies’ Association of Uganda. (AAU? Kind of funny considering how much weed and alcohol those guys consume no?) They, on the other hand decided to coalesce and give a united position to the Media Owner’s Association, which had triggered all of this. Some radicals said they should get together with their clients and force the media houses to apologize and come to more amenable terms of payment and relationships.
What does this mean for the future?

The Bush and the Gynecologist are definitely not being loved in a lot of client circles and if you are keen there will noticeably be reduced invitations to them to attend corporate functions in the period ahead. 

A certain guerilla caucus has come together to find all the ways in which the Vision conglomerate and the Nation behemoth are replaceable starting with the newspapers. Starting at the top, they are re-doing the research, figures, rationales, and psychographics to justify why all the FMCG companies and the corporatocracy should shift from mainstream media and now invest in more audience-driven forms of media. Perhaps new media even; blogs, Facebook, websites, twitter, You Tube, mobile phone ads, etc. We know that Fireworks has a team dedicated to online/new media; surveying, analyzing, studying, experimenting. Are they about to propose a radical shift to their clientele that will extend the advertising frontier, once again?

The smaller players in this convoluted power play have failed to get their erections up to speak up for their rights and so they are doing what they know to do best; going behind the big boys and saying ”Those guys are doing their own thing, you just give me my thing.” The disconnect this has created is not to be ignored. The agencies have not and will not. What they do next with this crack will probably shake the media industry like we have never seen. Perhaps a total advertising blacklist of New Vision, or the Nation Group?

Let’s wait and see.

The agencies have become galvanized under one umbrella body. Whether this is a good thing or not can only be seen with the passing of time. The Scangroup behemoth (East Africa’s largest spender and biggest marketing services provider) is in search of a Ugandan Telco to bolster its ranks. They already have the East African Breweries and the regional Lafarge business to cater to. When I spoke with CEO to one of the agencies that handle one of the Telcos, she said, “What I think we should do is organize as the big agencies and squeeze these small motherfuckers out of business. Because if we dare try and stand against the media houses, they will go behind our backs and confuse our clients and next thing you know we will be royally shafted here. They can do it.” What she meant was squeeze the agencies without big clients out of business by negotiating better commissions from the media houses through bulk buying. What this would do in essence would be to force the industry to re-align reporting, billing and fiscal control procedures. So one uniform billing document recognizable across the industry, one process. A clear signal of progress in the industry but what does it truly mean for the clients? In a world of organized and unionized advertising, there are no surprises, no game-changers, and definitely no lowered costs. The client looking for clear, distinctive and outstanding advertising and market presence will have to literally go rogue, but which agency will, or can? The argument can be made that a lot of agencies will think out of the box and go rogue. That is until they become isolated by fellow agencies, over charged by the media houses and soon rejected by the corporate machine; killing creativity, and dulling the sharp, incisive edge that it takes to cut through today’s’ advertising clutter. What is dizzyingly clear though is that the industry will never be same after this. 

Bush promised the powers that be a platform on which he would deliver the 2011 election. He gave them Bukedde TV, has opened a radio in every mainstream local dialect and is on a roll to revamp the local language papers. This happens amidst an environment where all media houses are trying to acquire more media houses. KFM, currently the most listened to station in inner and greater Kampala, is shopping for upcountry stations to bolster its arsenal of listenership and footprint, while Dembe FM recently acquired the rural based Rwenzori FM. So as the media landscape’s tectonic plates continue to shift and change one thing is for sure; we are on the cusp of something that has happened in very few other countries: Uganda is preparing to leap frog – Again!

Mobile Banking and the African Market

One year ago when I wrote a post on UBA and Mobile Banking, it was little regarded. MTN had just launched its own platform; MTN Mobile Money; all these of course behind Kenya's M-Pesa,-the system which revolutionized rural banking in Kenya. 

Today, almost a year later I read this in the New Vision. The question is whether it makes sense that a technology that was available two years ago and licenses were issued , and yet only one more company has managed to launch the Mobile money service. 

Zain's which is built on a regional platform is clearly the most competitive. MTN's Mobile still struggles with product consistency and pricing reactions. There are  also the overhead challenges of literacy and adoption, which have forced the market leaders to invest large amounts in public education and awareness campaigns. The danger I see in this for new entrants like Uganda Telecom is the lack of industry insights and the clear gap between the stalwarts and freshies.

But what does it say for the industry going forward?

My view is that until the phone companies can invest in a translated Sim card which speaks at least 2 local languages/dialects, they will continue to suffer. This is of course not easy because of the absence of a unifying local language. it also points to the unique market landscape that is Uganda. In many ways Uganda serves as microcosm of the greater African problem. The absence of significant language blocks has been a pitfall to a lot of communication executions.

Secondly, while a lot of market figures show Uganda's young population and project it to explode in the next few years due to an albeit interesting mix of prurient factors, the fact remains that westernization or whatever is causing this population to have this much sex is not about to stop, Work with stakeholders it address the population issue, then plan to maximize each individuals income per capita through empowerment, education and improvement of quality of life. Then you can milk them. 

But why all that hustle? Why invest all that money in order to get a small part of the market share? Because when it’s all said and done, the small segment you get will be a loyal, committed segment. Which is problem number 3: LOYALTY. The absence of brand loyalty in a lot of emerging markets can be attributed to a lot of factors (unstable political histories, illiteracy, cultural nuances, fear and superstitions, etc) and while its every business' big nightmare, it is not out of reach for a brand to nurture a loyal, committed customer base. No one just wants to pay for it.

And so my answer to UTL and the other Telecom companies out there reaping big in Uganda is this: there is a much bigger market called Africa, unbanked, uneducated, unlinked and in a lot of cases unbothered by you. If you must drink that juice, you must squeeze that fruit.

In order to reach Africa's most basic consumer, you need to come from above the line marketing to the line, and then take your communication through the line and below it. Reach the guy whose greatest problem is cattle dip vet solutions. Help him address his issues not just be a statistic in your marketing sheet. Then you will have made a real difference. It is my belief that only then will it all come together; because bottom up approaches never failed anywhere.