Sh. 7,656,500! This was the total amount that Purity Karambu Laird, a financial expert, lost to Hesbon Onyango Nyamweya, an inmate at the Kamiti Maximum Prison who is serving jailtime for defilement.
How did it all happen? How was an inmate at Kamiti able to pull such a scam on a financial expert? Ms. Karambu shocked a Nairobi court when she narrated how an elaborate scheme to scam her was laid out by Nyamweya and his mother Pamela Akinyi Wara.
She informed the court that she lost the money in the year 2020. At that time, Karambu had been seeking to invest in real estate. “I wanted to invest in commercial building which could provide me with good returns,” she told Milimani Chief Magistrate Susan Shitubi.
She started scouting online and landed on a real estate website that identified as Badoo Online. She says that she identified a house on the website that she wanted to invest in and scooped the number listed on the site. Karambu then called and connected with a seller who identified himself as James.
Between May 1, 2020, and September 17, 2020, Karambu and ‘James’ maintained regular phone communication, as James went on to build trust and present himself as a legitimate seller. At certain points in their conversations, James claimed that he was a doctor with dual citizenship in Kenya and Tanzania. He claimed that he was also a medical doctor who was working in South Africa.
Unbeknown to Karambu, ‘James’ was an inmate serving time at Kamiti under the real name Hesbon Onyango Nyamweya. James went on to sweettalk his way into Karambu’s purse.
“In the first instance, he told me that he was at the Kenyan-Tanzanian border and he had not processed his paperwork and due to that reason, he could not access his bank account for transactions,” said Karambu. The Kamiti inmate then requested Sh. 38,000 to process the paperwork with a promise to refund the money. Karambu sent the money.
After a while, James called Karambu again and told her that the process was taking long but would be completed the following day. He then requested for a further Sh. 5,000 for food and accommodation and Karambu sent the money.
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Karambu further stunned the court when she revealed that James had also claimed to have fallen sick and taken to Rayaan Hospital in Kajiado for testing, upon which Karambu sent him Sh. 48,000 for treatment.
“I was later called by a man who introduced himself as Dr. Emmanuel who informed me that James had contracted the virus and needed to be transferred to their sister hospital known as Sanitas in Tanzania,” she said. More money was requested and Karambu wired it. Between June 29, 2020 and August 2020, she sent Sh. 7.65 to Nyamweya.
At this point, Dr. Emmanuel called her to say that James had passed away at the Tanzania hospital. “The numbers that James and Dr. Emmanuel had been using went off. It was only then that I realized that I had been conned,” she told the court.
Karambu reported the matter at Thika Police Station where her case was referred to the Serious Crimes Unit at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI). The DCI, with assistance from mobile service providers, traced and nabbed Nyamweya and his mother Akinyi.
The DCI said that after receiving the money, Nyamweya transferred it to his mother Akinyi in several tranches over a period of five months. The money was then used to acquire properties in Ongata Rongai, Lang’ata, and Migori County. Detectives further stated that AKinyi is building a multi-million residential unit in Ongata Rongai, which has raised concern that Karambu may not have been the only victim to have lost millions.
