I wonder how many $tarry eyed Kenyans we have out there mesmerized by stories from total strangers promising them untold wealth and million$ enough to keep them happy and contented for many years to come while their sole intention is to make your life a living hell as they fleece every last shilling from you while at the same time skillfully manipulating you to make one extra final payment to secure the deal of a lifetime. I have a story to tell that could be just one such of many Kenyans!
One of the clients at the bank where I work walked into my office recently and asked for a loan of $ 2,000.00 to repay back a loan that he had borrowed from someone for some unidentified transaction. It was obvious he was not being truthful as he could not look me in the eye and was shifting in his chair. Years of working in a bank has honed my instincts as to when someone is telling the truth or otherwise and I usually try to make the person relax so that he can open up by engaging in small talk, enquiring about his family and profession and assuring them that whatever they say shall be held in total confidence.
Having never dealt with this client before, I made small talk asking him what he did for a living and how business was. To my surprise, he is a trained engineer in one of those engineering lines that are few and far between. He runs his own business and has some good names on his client list, as he told me, many being among the big corporates in Kenya and therefore he has the potential to have a very successful business if well managed. Having somewhat relaxed him by getting him to talk about what he was familiar with, I then sought to know the reason for his strange request but he was still not willing to disclose all continuing to squirm in his chair.
Then out of the blue he blurted out that he needed the money to pay some fee to Scotland Yard in London so that a substantial amount would be paid out to him from an investment that had matured in the UK. My antenna was up! Why would a police department involve itself in a commercial transaction between a bank and its client? Surely assuming that it was money laundering or terrorism related, the responsibility of finding out rested with the transacting bank who if suspicious would then report the matter through the correct channels to the relevant authorities? I could tell that this was only half the story but decided to act as if it made a lot of sense to me and requested for supporting documents to back up his story so that I could see where this was going and whether i would be in a position to loan him the money.
Two hours later, the chap was back with some email correspondences from a firm in the Kent in the United Kingdom called Fidelity xxxxxxxxxx UK. The correspondences contained a copy of a document that was under a very official looking logo of “Metropolitan Police Department Headquarters, New Scotland Yard, LONDON” marked “Completed form to be submitted with 3,745GBP”. The client had completed all the requested details on the form and also attached a remittance slip from Natwest Bank for an amount of GBP 34,500.00 which I presumed that he had already paid. When I asked what relevance the $ 2,000.00 that he needed to borrow had on this transaction, he told me it was a final stamp duty that needed to be paid for the princely sum of GBP 45,745,000.00 (Kshs. 5.9 Billion) to be transferred to his account in Kenya! I was aghast.
I asked him to leave the papers with me for internal consultation in the bank and I would revert to him in due course. He prepared to leave and helpfully informed me that the name of his legal consultant in Kent was on the exchanges of emails and I was free to contact her if I so wished.
My internal consultant, the famous Mr. Google was summoned and after some instructions went to work. This was obviously a very sophisticated or a very recent advance payment scam, reported Mr. Google, since none of the principal actors by personal name or company referenced showed up anywhere on his data base.
There are several websites that report on international scams and if per chance you should receive an unsolicited email that is suspicious, googling any of the names on the email will invariably direct you to a site that reveals that you are about to be scammed. In this case none of the names appeared meaning the scam was still very much in its infancy and had not yet been widely circulated.
I was shocked! Here was a 70 something old man, an engineer by profession being scammed in an advance payment scam where he had already potentially lost almost Kshs. 5 million in the pursuit of billions. Could he not see it was all a scam? Did he not have sons and daughters or a wife to confide in and get affirmation that the transaction was genuine? Had he been manipulated by the scammers who rely on the information being kept confidential by the person being scammed as they proceed to milk you out of your life savings while promising millions that are being dangled tantalizingly close to be paid out after you made another payment to another department, another tax office, another handling company, another security company and another and another always sure in the belief that so long as you don’t tell anyone else, you will reap the riches yourself?
It was sad and disheartening because I had seen this in a relative several years earlier who had been scammed in the same way over almost 4 months and had squandered his savings and had finally out of desperation approached me to lend him some Kshs. 200,000.00 with the promise of paying me Kshs. 1,000,000.00 after a month or once he was paid. Having immediately smelt a scam I had bought time by telling him that a fixed deposit that I had was going to mature in a week and that I would be able to give him the money then. I then approached his elder brother and told him the story that his younger brother had been scammed off close to Kshs. 750,000.00 (as he had told me) and was sinking deeper into debt as a result of continuing to borrow to fund the scammers. I have no idea how that particular saga ended but I was saddened that one so young and presumably with the ‘smarts’ to know when he was being scammed could get pulled in so quickly and easily.
You should know that no one is philanthropic enough to just throw money at you for nothing other than that they liked your name. In this day and age of the internet, there are scammer’s working day and night to relieve you of your hard earned money and they are ruthless, shameless and faceless individuals willing to do anything to separate you from your cash. They prey on the inherent greed of the human being and come out as confidants wishing to make your life better to the exclusion of everyone else. They get you into their confidence by telling you how your family will be pleasantly surprised when you suddenly reveal the fortune that you have managed to get and they convince you not to reveal to others what is happening lest they get greedy and attempt to harm you.
So, beware the tyranny of ‘scam’ numbers, you have been warned!
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