Betika has a problem. A very big, very documented, very official problem. And on May 13, a Nairobi High Court will hand down a judgment that is going to make that problem impossible to ignore.
Kenya’s most popular homegrown betting platform, owned by Shop and Deliver Limited and built by founders Chris Mwirigi and George Mburu, has been named in a Directorate of Criminal Investigations forensic report as a buyer of stolen private data. Not just any data. The personal records of millions upon millions of Kenyans who had no idea their information was being packaged, sold, and used to target them.
And Betika did not buy this data once. According to the DCI forensic analysis, Betika was the most frequent buyer in the scheme. It came back again and again.
Here is what happened.
Between June 2018 and May 2019, two former Safaricom employees, Simon Billy Kinuthia and Brian Wamatu Njoroge, ran a criminal operation from inside the company. They extracted subscriber data directly from Safaricom’s systems and sold it to betting firms. The DCI investigated, recovered their WhatsApp conversations, and produced an official forensic report documenting everything. Who sold. Who bought. How many times.
That report names Betika.
But the scale of what was stolen goes far beyond what has been publicly discussed. The data that was harvested and sold was not just the records of gamblers. On July 17, 2018, Kinuthia told his accomplice in a WhatsApp message that he had the full details of all 29.9 million Safaricom customers backed up somewhere. Every Kenyan on the Safaricom network at that time. Not just punters. Everyone.
The records that were sold included full names, identity card numbers, passport numbers, M-Pesa transaction histories, betting patterns, geolocation data placing people in specific localities, and handset identification numbers. This was not a list of phone numbers. This was a surveillance file on millions of Kenyans built from their most private financial and personal information, sold for profit to a company that then used it to target them with betting advertisements.
The men behind Betika are not nameless executives hiding in a boardroom somewhere. George Mburu is co-founder of Roamtech Solutions Limited, which is a shareholder and director of Shop and Deliver Limited, the company that runs Betika. Chris Mwirigi Kaumbuthu is listed as director and controlling shareholder of Shop and Deliver. According to information available to Nairobi Exposed, both Mburu and Mwirigi appear in the WhatsApp conversations recovered by DCI investigators in connection with the data purchases. Their names are in the forensic record that a Kenya government agency compiled.
This is not allegation by a blogger. This is the official evidence of Kenya’s own Directorate of Criminal Investigations.
Betika launched in 2016 and spent two years trying to chip away at the dominance of SportPesa and Betin. Then, in July 2019, the government cracked down on 27 betting firms, shutting down SportPesa, Betin, and Betway, which together controlled 85 percent of Kenya’s betting market. Their paybill numbers were killed, their licences refused.
Betika survived. Its licence was renewed. And within weeks, its user base exploded from 4.7 million to 18 million registered users.
That growth happened while the DCI was actively investigating a criminal scheme in which Betika had been purchasing stolen intelligence on millions of Kenyan bettors. The company that emerged from the industry crackdown as Kenya’s undisputed market leader had been, in the months leading up to that crackdown, buying a forensic map of every competitor’s customers, knowing their names, their losses, their locations, and their addiction levels.
Nobody asked how it happened so fast. Nobody looked.
The legal trouble Betika faces is coming from multiple directions now. The High Court petition, brought by Augustine Onalo on behalf of 11.5 million affected Safaricom subscribers, seeks Sh1.5 million per affected person from Safaricom for the breach. If the court validates the forensic evidence of data purchases by Betika, the same legal framework opens up for claims against the buying companies. The mathematics of that are staggering.
The Data Protection Act provides for criminal prosecution of directors who have committed wilful violations. The Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act criminalises the commercial use of data obtained through illegal computer access, with penalties of up to twenty years in prison. The Gambling Regulatory Authority of Kenya, which licences Betika and renewed that licence for the 2025/2026 period, has the power to revoke it.
All of this legal firepower has been available for seven years. The DCI compiled the forensic report in 2019. The company that bought the stolen data has been trading, advertising, sponsoring football clubs, and running jackpots ever since. Nobody at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, or the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has moved against Betika or its founders on the basis of the evidence their own investigators compiled.
There is also the matter of Ethiopia. In November 2025, the Ethiopian Lottery Service suspended the licences of twenty-two sports betting companies following a government investigation that alleged revenue concealment of over 100 billion birr, equivalent to roughly Sh83.5 billion. Betika’s Ethiopian entity was among the twenty-two suspended. The Ethiopian authorities arrested twenty-four people. Betika posted a notice on its Ethiopian website saying it had been suspended for an indefinite period and would return soon with improved odds. It has made no public statement on the substance of the allegations.
A company that survived Kenya’s 2019 crackdown by complying with tax demands its rivals rejected is now accused in Ethiopia of hiding the equivalent of Sh83.5 billion in revenue. The contrast does not explain itself.
Betika’s platform carries responsible gambling messaging as required by law. It warns users that gambling can be addictive. It advises users to bet only what they can afford to lose. It has sponsored football, rugby, and community events. Its founders are celebrated as Kenyan technology entrepreneurs who built a continental betting brand from Parklands.
The DCI forensic report does not care about the sponsorships. It names the company. It names the founders. It documents the purchases. It is a matter of public record sitting in a Nairobi High Court file.
On May 13, the court speaks. And for the first time in seven years, Betika will have nowhere to look but directly at what the evidence says about how this empire was built.
Shop and Deliver Limited, George Mburu, and Chris Mwirigi did not respond to questions sent by Nairobi Exposed regarding the DCI forensic report, the data purchase allegations, or the Ethiopian suspension. No response was received before publication.
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