Sweet-talkers now in major fraud business

• New kind of confidence crime replacing the more threatening type that had become commonplace

It begins with a beep on your cell phone, but you recognise neither the sender nor the sense of the message. But it appears to contain sensitive information. You ignore it, but soon the sender contacts you, thanking you for safeguarding the information you never understood in the first place.

Last week, a message sent to Robert, a Nairobi businessman, addressed him as Mr Shariff. The sender signed off as Daniel Omika from Uganda. In the message, Omika said he had just crossed the border to Kenya and would arrive in Mombasa the following day.

“Please confirm my cargo at the port,” the massage read, giving the container number and the secret word required to enable someone to inspect and clear the goods.

Hours after Robert had ignored the message, he received a call from a man with a Ugandan accent who said the message had been sent to the wrong number and pleaded with him not to use the information he had provided.

Robert reassured him, and the conversation turned friendly, drifting quickly to other issues. By the time the conversation ended, the caller had offered to make a stopover in Nairobi on his way back to Kampala to meet Robert for a cup of tea to express his gratitude.

“I wasn’t interested in the meeting, but the man kept calling to update me on his progress at the port, finally saying his cargo had left for Kampala and he would follow it up the following day,” Robert recalled.

When the next call came, the “Ugandan” claimed he had been involved in a minor accident near Voi when he rammed into another car.
A police officer at the scene had ruled he was in the wrong and had towed the vehicles to the station.

“But the police inspector, he told me, had allowed them (the drivers) to settle the matter out of court. The other driver was an Asian businessman,” Robert said.

The “inspector” offered to talk to Robert on the phone, advising him to help his foreign friend to settle the claim. “On the phone, the officer was wondering why the Ugandan, who drove a luxury four-wheel drive and had $40,000, did not have just Sh34,000 to settle the problem,” Robert added.

When he was asked to send the money via M-Pesa to bail out his “friend,” he smelt a rat. Unknown to many Kenyans, this kind of confidence game is a new trend in crime. Many people have been tricked this way and have lost a lot of money, according to Munga Nyale, head of the police highway patrol unit .

“These incidents have given my officers a bad name, especially those patrolling the lower end of the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, because it is where the fraudsters claim to be calling from,” he said.

The CID headquarters is receiving a growing number of these cases. Mr Nyale, a career detective, handled one of them.

“We tracked the fraudster’s mobile phone number to the Nakuru GK Prison. It was being used by two convicts.

To thwart the criminals, Mr Nyale has released hotlines where people who find themselves in such situations can call to check before agreeing to send money.

Emergence of the new trend appears to have replaced a previous one that had become commonplace in which Kenyans received threatening calls.