A 38-year-old Kenyan woman is in police custody after detectives from Kamukunji tracked her down to a hideout in Tassia and arrested her over a brazen scam that saw a Chinese national conned out of USD 101,000.
Harriet Mary Wabwire, the prime suspect in the high-stakes fraud, allegedly masqueraded as the Director of a fictitious company, OTD Group Limited. She duped the foreign investor into believing she could supply 23,890 kilograms of aluminium alloys for shipment to Ningbo, China.
As part of her elaborate scheme, Wabwire furnished the victim with a forged bill of lading and a fake Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) certificate of conformity — documents that purported to show that a 40-foot container loaded with aluminium was already secured and ready for dispatch from the Port of Mombasa.
With confidence in the deal, the unsuspecting Chinese national wired a staggering USD 101,000 into Wabwire’s bank account. But shortly after receiving the funds, Wabwire switched off her phone and vanished without a trace.
What followed was a weeks-long manhunt. Leveraging forensic technology and intelligence leads, detectives from Kamukunji finally closed in on her hideout in the Tassia area of Nairobi. She was arrested without incident and is currently in custody undergoing police processing.
Police say she will be arraigned once investigations are concluded.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) has since issued a warning to foreign investors to verify business entities and consult relevant government bodies before transacting, as cases of fraudulent trade deals involving fake export documents are on the rise.
The arrest has once again drawn attention to the growing trend of cross-border commercial fraud in Kenya, where swindlers prey on unsuspecting international buyers using forged documents and non-existent companies.
