A recent Interpol assessment on SIM-swap and mobile banking fraud in Kenya made a passing but striking observation: millennials, people born between 1981 and 1996, are the demographic most affected by these crimes.
The report offered the figures but not the explanation. That leaves a more interesting question unanswered: why this age group specifically?
There is no official study that has directly addressed that question. What follows, then, is not a reported finding but an attempt to reason through it, based on how this generation uses financial services and behaves online.
To begin with, millennials are the generation that came of age as financial services moved onto the phone. Older Kenyans came of age with cash and bank queues, and adapted to mobile money later. Millennials, by contrast, entered adulthood just as M-Pesa was becoming the default way to get paid, pay bills, send money home and even take out a loan.
That means millennials are more likely to rely heavily on mobile money in their everyday financial lives. More transactions, more accounts linked to a single phone number, and a larger digital footprint.
A criminal targeting a demographic for maximum yield would logically go where the money moves often, and millennials are likely to be well represented there.
There is also a confidence factor worth considering. Millennials came of age alongside the rapid adoption of digital technology and are generally comfortable using apps and digital financial services. That familiarity can be an advantage, but it may also create a degree of confidence that makes some people less likely to question a system or interaction that appears routine.
Older generations, less at ease with technology, may be more suspicious of anything unfamiliar arriving on their phones, whether it is an unexpected message or a call claiming to be from a bank.
Younger users, meanwhile, have grown up in an online environment where scams are a routine part of digital life. Millennials sit somewhere in between: confident enough to move fast, but not always cautious enough to stop and question a call from someone claiming to be their network provider.
Then there is the question of life stage. Millennials are in the thick of their working and earning years, holding down jobs, running side businesses, servicing loans and supporting family members. They are therefore more likely to have money moving through their phones regularly, whether for salaries, bills, business or family support.
That constant flow of transactions may make them more attractive targets for fraudsters — and make an unauthorized transaction harder to spot immediately. Someone moving money through their phone every day presents a very different opportunity from a retiree whose account barely changes.
There is also a simpler explanation: fraud tends to follow usage. If millennials make up a large share of active mobile-money users in Kenya today, then it would not be surprising if they also accounted for a large share of victims.
Being the most affected age group isn’t necessarily proof of being careless; it may partly reflect simply being the most present in the exact space where this fraud happens.
None of this is a complete answer, and it shouldn’t be treated as one. It is an attempt to explain a statistic that Interpol and local reporting have so far left unexplained.
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