A Nairobi court heard how a Kamiti Maximum Prison convict defrauded a desperate job seeker Ksh800,000.
During the session, on February, Friday 11, 2022, Patrick Shikure confessed that he defrauded the woman Ksh800,000 while serving a life sentence inside the highly guarded facility.
The convict serving a life sentence at the Maximum Prison for the last 15 years admitted to receiving the Ksh800,000 fraudulently from a job seeker.
Shikure also admitted before the magistrate that he had promised the job seeker a Human Resource Manager position at State House.
He also confessed that he used Defense Cabinet Secretary Eugene Wamalwa's name to defraud the victim.
The court directed that Shikure be sentenced at a later date within the month.
The Shikure case is not an isolated one. Incidents of convicts defrauding unsuspecting Kenyans have made headlines in the past. At some point, it emerged that prisoners employed sophisticated scams that can earn them Ksh80,000 to Ksh370,000 a day.
A report in a local daily detailed that some of the convicts revealed to the publication that his preferred targets were househelps or watchmen.
The most recent proof of this ingenuity, as documented by Daily Nation, is the rise of digital banking fraud by canning swindlers, known (almost fondly) as ‘Kamiti Boys’.
In 2020, President Uhuru Kenyatta announced that the proverbial 40 days would soon catch up to Kamiti Prison phone scammers.
Speaking at the 44th Prisons Pass-out Parade at Prisons Staff Training College, Ruiru, the Head of State noted that the correctional facilities had acquired equipment to nab the perpetrators.
He stated that a number of prisons in the country had enhanced surveillance systems on the inmates with signal interceptors and CCTV cameras to monitor their activities.
"With these innovations and high tech equipment under the watchful eye of the prison officers, the common scam of 'kupokea simu ya kamiti' (a phone call from Kamiti) will be a thing of the past," he stated.
The adoption of mobile banking in the country has grown at an unprecedented rate and numbers that would have previously been termed unbelievable.
After being released from prison some of these convicts go home with huge sums of money, that they have conned unsuspecting targets.
