savemymomo

Inspiration

I received a call one day from a very distressed caller. She seemed to have accidentally send 250.000frs to my momo account and she said it was money for her sister's surgery. Being so compassionate, i sent her back the 250.000frs. Immediately i received the message, i then realised that i had been scammed since the message captions were different. I spoke to some of my friends and realised that i was not the only victim. We then came together to from a team and tried to solve this problem with the use of tech.

What it does

The system freezes the account of the culprit. The system acts as a tool that the user could use to freeze the account of this culprit until further investigation and arbitration is done by MTN and then where the funds go is then decided.

How we built it

We met up with some of the partners of MTN and partnered with them in order to have the same privileges as these partners of MTN. We could then have access to MTN's APIs and be able to invoke methods that through our API's will be able freeze a user's momo account.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a challenge of creating these partnerships The application is a web based application and we are not yet able to help save all mobile money users as a great number of them do not have access to smart devices capable of internet access. We're not yet able to access MTN's API's directly which could greatly help us figure out who these culprits are and curb these scams. The time frame for building the system was also a huge challenge and so we had to work day and night Collaborating as a team and having clearly defined roles was also one of our biggest challenges Getting access to these API's on time Financial challenges. being able to fund the project, money for transportation to the meetup spot, internet connection and a lot of other financial challenges

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the fact that we are able to build a problem that actually solves a real world problem. We're proud of the fact that other people will not be victims or at least have a shot at saving themselves from these culprits. We're also proud of the fact that young individuals like ourselves could go into offices and create real life connections that could actually prove useful.

What we learned

We learned that solving a problem in tech is not easy as we kept encountering barriers and we kept find ways to either evade or face them directly. We learned that gaining connections is not always going to be easy. We could eventually get insults but we have to be steadfast and we'd always get results We learned the journey to success is not an easy one. We also learned that there is joy and satisfaction in the solving of real life problems We learned that working as a team is not always going to be the easiest but with concentration, time and dedication, we could make almost anything work.

What's next for savemymomo

We look forward to getting financial funding to be able to strengthen our ties with MTN also other mobile money operating companies like OM. After these, we will be able to get access to their APIs and perform our function a lot faster We intend to introduce the service as USSD. Doing this is going to enable all users of mobile money to be able to save themselves from these scams. We also intend to introduce android and IOS applications for smartphone users to make the blocking process a 3 seconds process.