The bank had closed for the weekend when the robbers struck. Apart from the security guards at the entrances and a handful of IT technicians, the rest of the employees of the bank’s headquarters in Upper Hill Nairobi had gone home. - @dailynation

Then the complaints started streaming in. Clients started receiving messages about the withdrawal of little amounts of money from their accounts on their mobile phones.

The tech-savvy ones took to social media to complain about money disappearing from their accounts while the rest waited for Monday to lodge official complaints.

By the time the bank realised what was happening, more than Sh400M had walked away through a computer that had been connected to the bank’s network through its headquarters branch weeks earlier.

The culprits? A cybercrime gang whose roots began in 2015 and which has never been arrested.

Reason? The criminal justice system lacks the capacity to get the evidence needed to apprehend the suspects.

Most importantly, however, is that the lender that lost the money fears putting through a public judicial process about the loss of money in their care as it could create a bank run.

Silent Cards, the name of the gang that pulled off the Sh400M heist last year, continues to roam free and plot more cyberattacks.

With CCTVs all over and armed policemen stationed round the clock in banking halls, criminals can no longer walk into a bank and order everyone to lie down like it was done in days gone by. The real robbing of financial institutions, however, takes place on the Internet.

And while homegrown cyber gangs have been active in Kenya since 2015, the lack of an effective legal means to shut them down has given them room to evolve into large cartels made up of money launderers, hackers, coders and operators.

What began as one-man operated criminals exploiting the weaknesses of Internet users to extort or defraud them has evolved into a multibillion-dollar transnational crime that knows no physical borders, whose masterminds are bleeding banks.

Kenya lost Sh21.1B to cybercrime in 2017, 40% up from Sh15.1B in 2015, according to the 2017 Kenya Cybersecurity Report by Serianu, an IT services consultancy firm.

In 2018, the figure climbed to Sh29B. Banks accounted for 18% of the attacks, while payment systems accounted for 10%.

. @CA_Kenya's cyber intelligence team detected at least 37.1M cases of cyber threats in the period between October and December 2019, a 47% increase from the previous quarter.

Kenya has never successfully prosecuted and jailed a single suspect of cyber fraud. The police have limited resources and expertise to investigate such crimes. Arrests are few and far between, and if one is arrested, the penalties are often too lenient.

For instance, when the court found four businessmen guilty of hacking the Judiciary finance systems and requesting the Treasury to pay Sh80M to fictitious firms that supplied air in January this year, the ring leader of the gang, Reuben Kirongothi, did not turn up in court.

A month before the guilty verdict, Kirongothi had been arrested in Kigali for leading another 12-man gang in an attempt to hack into a Rwandese bank.

All the four Kenyans arrested in Rwanda were facing similar charges in Kenya, but were out on bond pending completion of their cases.

But while the justice system has been slow in concluding cases touching on cybercrime, making it difficult to curb the crime in its entirety, banks which are the main targets, would rather focus on recovering lost money instead of making public what they lose.

On average, one bank is successfully hit by hackers every month while hundreds of attacks are successfully repulsed.

But in reality, the banks suffer much more, something @KenyaBankers chair Habil Olaka says is more of a security issue than the common misconception that lenders are hiding shame.

What is puzzling law enforcement agencies and financial institutions is how Kenya, a country with meagre computing skills and resources, has hacked its way into the list of major global cybercrime hotspots.

But with its good Internet speeds, availability of cheap computers and a robust banking system driven by technology, it’s not difficult to figure out why Kenya continues to breed such sophisticated criminals.

Kenyan banks suffering in silence as hackers run amok on their systems https://bit.ly/3gKCKlK