Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA) is a mechanism of informal collaborative savings that is widely used across the globe. Despite its popularity and prevalence, it is not well-studied from HCI and CSCW perspectives. The global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS) for greater financial inclusion but there have not been any DFS-based interventions around ROSCAs. In this paper, we report a qualitative study involving 80 individuals to understand the dynamics of ROSCAs and opportunities for their digitization in the Pakistani context. We also present a smartphone-based Digital ROSCA platform designed on top of a simulated mobile money system. The platform was designed to be inclusive towards low-literate users. We present qualitative findings of its evaluation with 15 users (3 individual ROSCA groups). We find that digitization has the potential to support and strengthen traditional ROSCAs by mitigating issues like record-keeping, delayed payments, collection, distribution, and safety of money. It also allows the creation of payment history for individuals that can be used to score their financial credibility.

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Mobile-based scams are on the rise in emerging markets. However, the awareness about these scams and ways to avoid them remains limited among mobile users. We present a qualitative analysis of the dynamics of mobile-based fraud (specifically, SMS and call-based fraud) in Pakistan. We interviewed 96 participants, including different stakeholders in the mobile financial ecosystem: 71 victims of mobile-based scams, seven non-victims, 15 mobile money agents, and three officials from regulatory agencies that investigate mobile-based fraud. Leveraging the perspectives from these stakeholders and analyzing mobile-based fraud with a four-step social-engineering attack framework, we make four concrete contributions: First, we identify the nuances as well as specific tactics, methods, and resources that fraudsters use to scam mobile users. Second, we look at other actors, beyond the victim and the adversary, involved or affected by fraud and their roles at each step of the fraud process. Third, we discuss victims' understanding of mobile fraud, their behavior post-realization, and their attitudes toward reporting fraud. Finally, we discuss possible points of intervention and offer design recommendations to thwart mobile fraud, including addressing the vulnerabilities discovered in the ecosystem, utilizing existing actors to mitigate the consequences of these attacks, and realigning the design of fraud reporting mechanisms with the sociocultural practices.

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