“I’ve sent it.” Here’s how to know they did.

The three you’ll meet

Fake payments at a counter come in a few familiar shapes.

The screenshot. They hold up their phone with a MoMo confirmation on it. It might be real but old, real but sent to somebody else, or edited. From across a counter you can’t tell which, and a queue behind them doesn’t help.

The SMS. A message arrives on your phone that looks like a MoMo alert: the amount, a reference, even a balance. It came from an ordinary number, not from your network. Some are good enough to fool anyone who reads them quickly.

“Sent by mistake.” A message says money was sent to you in error, and a call follows asking you to send it back. Often nothing was ever sent; the “alert” was fake, and the money you return is real.

There’s also the honest mistake that costs just as much: they sent it, but to a number one digit off yours.

The one check that catches all of them

Stop reading messages. Check your own wallet.

Every one of the fakes above is a message about money. None of them is money. The only proof a payment arrived is your own balance or transaction list, looked at on your own phone, from your network’s own menu or app.

On MTN, dial *170# on the phone that holds your MoMo wallet and go to My Wallet, where you’ll find your balance and your recent transactions. The MoMo app shows the same. If the money isn’t there, it hasn’t arrived, whatever anybody’s phone says.

It takes under a minute, which is exactly why it doesn’t get done at one o’clock with ten people waiting.

When someone says they sent it by mistake

Be polite and be slow:

1. Check your own balance. If the money isn’t there, it was never sent, and you can stop.
2. If it is there, don’t send it back yourself, even to be kind. Tell them to call their network with the details. A genuine mistake can be reversed by the network.
3. Never read a code or a PIN to anybody on the phone. No network needs your PIN to give you money.

Set up the counter so nobody has to check

Checking your balance works, but it asks the busiest person in the building to stop and look at a phone for every MoMo sale. The better fix is a way of taking MoMo that confirms itself.

A merchant number or a prompt. When the customer pays a merchant number, or approves a prompt sent to their phone, the payment comes from their side with their PIN. There’s no message to fake, because you’re not being told about a payment, you’re receiving it.

A till that waits for the money. With Tabworthy, you type the customer’s number and the prompt lands on their phone. The sale only closes when the money has actually arrived; until then it says it’s waiting. There’s nothing to believe or disbelieve. If they walk off without approving, nothing was marked paid. Mobile money shows how it goes.

One phone for the money. If you take transfers to your own number, have one phone that holds the wallet, kept at the counter, and one person who checks it. Not whoever happens to be nearest.

Keep MoMo apart in your records

Whatever you use, write MoMo in its own column, never mixed in with cash. At the end of the day, what the records say came in on MoMo should match what the wallet shows arrived, less the charges. When it doesn’t, you’ll know which day to look at. The daily sales record has a MoMo column, and who pays the MoMo charge explains the difference you should expect.

If you’ve been caught

It happens to careful people. Write down the number that sent the fake message and the time, and report it to your network. Then change the way the counter takes MoMo, so it’s the process that protects you next time, not anybody’s attention.