Dealers are taking advantage of the limited availability of information and have set up creative vehicles allowing them to extract significant margins.
One service that allows users to buy airtime for family at home is offering what seem to be attractive offers but are in fact dishonest rip offs.
"Send $5 airtime to any phone in Zimbabwe and your recipient will receive $10 airtime through a buy-one-get-one-free deal," the offer said.
At current circulating rates according to ZimBollar, the US$5 is equivalent to RTGS$17.50. The forex dealers are extracting RTGS$7.50 from the transaction and passing on only RTGS$10 to the recipient. This is in addition to the profits they will extract when selling the foreign currency to industry.
Rates are also suppressed overall.
UK based forex dealers are manipulating both the GBP to USD conversion and then misrepresenting the parallel market rate in Harare.
UK senders are losing about RTGS$73 for every £100 sent.
Calculations done by Kuririgo indicate that it is in cheaper to send hard currency via Western Union than using mobile options.
