"Hello... Give Me the Code": How Iraqis Lose Their Money in a Single Phone Call—and Where Are the FinTech Companies?
An ordinary phone call. A confident voice on the other end claims to be from the customer support team of your digital wallet provider. The caller warns that your account must be verified or updated to avoid suspension. Then comes the critical request: "Please tell me the verification code you just received by text message." Within seconds of sharing the One-Time Password (OTP), your account balance is gone.
This alarming scenario is no longer an isolated occurrence. It has evolved into a widespread fraud scheme targeting users of financial technology (FinTech) services across Iraq. Security authorities have reported a significant rise in telephone-based scams, with fraudsters exploiting the limited digital literacy of many citizens who have only recently adopted electronic payment services, allowing criminals to empty digital wallets in a matter of moments.
The question now being asked across Iraq is straightforward: Where are the financial service providers in the face of this growing wave of fraud?
FinTech companies invest heavily in billboard advertising, large-scale marketing campaigns, and customer acquisition initiatives. Yet when it comes to protecting the savings of the very users they have encouraged to adopt digital payments, public awareness efforts often remain limited to routine text-message warnings that many customers overlook. Comprehensive educational campaigns are rare, and many applications still lack prominent in-app security alerts that could stop users before they unknowingly hand over access to fraudsters.
Convincing Iraqis to move away from cash and entrust their salaries and personal savings to digital financial platforms has required years of effort. Yet that trust can be destroyed in the course of a single one-minute phone call.
Unless electronic payment providers accept greater responsibility by launching sustained cybersecurity awareness campaigns that match the scale of their marketing investments, they risk doing more than leaving customers vulnerable to scammers—they risk undermining the future of financial inclusion and digital banking adoption in Iraq.