Kamiti inmates have proved time and time again to be as creative as they are industrious.
They say learning is a lifelong experience and this has held true for those who have managed not only to survive incarceration but, in fact, to thrive behind the metal bars.
The most recent proof of this ingenuity, as documented by Daily Nation, is the rise of digital banking fraud by talented swindlers, known (almost fondly) as ‘Kamiti Boys’.
You may be familiar with the con but what you may be unaware of is the precision and scale at which the fraud is run.
The script is pretty simple, it goes something like this: A man calls you, charms you into believing that he is, indeed as he claims, an official from the head office of a bank.
He uses the same skill to get you to cede confidential details of your mobile bank account.
Within minutes, your account is cleaned out and any money you held there becomes little better than a memory.
There is nothing beautiful that escapes flaws and the adage holds true for Kenya’s digital banking sector.
The adoption of mobile banking in the country has grown at speeds and numbers that would have previously been termed unbelievable.
A study from Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) authored by Francis Gwer, Paul Gubbins, Edoardo Totolo and Jack Odero has placed penetration of digital banking at 87 per cent.
“Overall, there has been significant growth in digital account ownership, uptake and usage over the last three years. FinAccess 2019 shows that 87 per cent of households in Kenya have access to a digital account and 78 per cent are active account owners,” the report read.
The appeal of digital accounts, as it has been packaged to users, lies in the fact that annual transaction costs are about a third of what a user would pay while using traditional banking methods.
The downside is that while in the past, the only risk your banked money faced was from armed thugs or thieving bank directors, you must now be wary of con artists.
Yet, phone scams in Kenya are nothing new, or to better put: though the forests may have changed, the monkeys remain the same.
A tree is only as high as its roots are deep and those of Kamiti boys and their con artistry have been documented as far back as 2012.
Some of the convicts running the most lucrative schemes spoke to Daily Nation back in 2012 claimed that the prisoners could make as much as Ksh 500,000 back then through fraud.
“From here, I can run my businesses without being detected. I have bought matatus, built houses and bought land through third parties in various parts of the country. If I leave this place, I am sure that I will be richer than I could have imagined while outside," an inmate disclosed.
Eight years on and the con-artistry not only continues but grows steadily more sophisticated as it adapts to emerging technologies.\
As the digital landscape changes, so too do the scripts for the cons.
Just a month into 2020, fraudsters have managed to advance their phishing skills to clone official numbers of financial service providers. They call you with their personal line but your phone erroneously identifies the incoming call to be the official number used by your trusted financial institution.
