Paper short abstract:

Kenyan fiscal policies have increasingly tapped into and been mediated by digital financial services and technologies. Entanglements between the fiscal and the digital have given way to a pervasive and self-fulfilling anti-fraud moral panic that amplifies interpersonal and institutional mistrust.

Paper long abstract:

In Kenya, digital financial services have increasingly taken centre stage in fiscal policies over the past decade. The Kenyan Treasury has repeatedly hiked taxes on SIM-card-based mobile money transfers as well as digital payment and lending services. This fiscal regime has contributed to widespread economic insecurity and immiseration. It has also redefined popular conceptions of ‘the digital’ by foregrounding how digital financial technologies entwine and impose state and corporate interests at ordinary citizens’ expense. Here, ‘fiscal disobedience’ (Roitman 2005) and ‘fiscal workarounds’ (Magale and Schmidt 2024) involve more than disengaging digital financial technologies and relying on informal networks and cash-based flows. Some fintech users covertly situate themselves within formal fiscal-digital flows to defraud others – including friends and family – or to track and seize government welfare and pension payments distributed via digital channels. That said, fintech fraud remains rare, contained within specific sites (e.g., maximum security prisons), and outwardly oriented towards Europe and America. Nevertheless, anti-fraud discourses are ubiquitous. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with scammers, human ATMs and mobile money agents, as well as fintech users and their families, this paper explores how this pervasive anti-fraud moral panic is re-shaping increasingly digitized fiscal flows. The resulting blockages and entanglements, many of which reflect the technocratic politics of transparency and authentication dominant in the global tech industry, are pushing people into fintech fraud and generating ‘fraudsters’ while amplifying citizen mistrust in state institutions, user mistrust in telecom companies and financial institutions, and interpersonal suspicions of fraud in family life.