- But when the police abruptly arrived there and broke open the boxes, they realized they contained fish cans.
- Others carried metals, cement and paraphernalia.
Four suspects were Thursday evening arrested in an ongoing crackdown on gold scammers targeting foreigners in the country. https://rb.gy/c4oxn
Image: COURTESY
Four suspects were Thursday evening arrested in an ongoing crackdown on gold scammers targeting foreigners in the country.
Whereas one of the suspects surrendered to police on learning he was wanted over the probe, three others were arrested in a store in South B and eight metal boxes were recovered.
A British national had been lured there to be shown gold cargo before it could be shipped out of the country, police said.
But when the police abruptly arrived there and broke open the boxes, they realized they contained fish cans.
Others carried metals, cement and paraphernalia. The Briton said he had not paid the Sh13 million processing fee the scammers wanted.
“I am lucky I had not paid as they demanded. Police arrived before they could lure me into a bank,” the victim said.
This comes days after an American national was conned $183,600 by the same gang in the city.
The victim, identified as Shelby Laney, a manager at Hi-Tech Precious Metals and Refinery (PMR), which claims to be a Texas-based refiner of precious metals such as silver, gold, platinum and palladium, was lured by the gang and taken to a warehouse in Syokimau with the fake gold.
Shelby who had been working with the scammers online, flew to the country to check the quality of the goods before making a purchase.
While there, she paid part of the freight for the first shipment, an instalment of 60 kilos of gold bars, but in the meantime, she became suspicious of the transaction and decided to alert the DCI.
She told detectives that the fraudsters, operating under the name Kelot Logistics and Storage Limited, took her on a tour of the warehouse where they conducted fake laser tests to determine the carat weight of the precious metal pieces and showed her dozens of sealed wooden crates that had been packed with "finished gold" ready for shipment.
Shelby added that she was also shown a box full of foreign currency, which the fraudsters claimed was payment for the gold to be delivered. It has emerged the money is fake and efforts to trace the same are ongoing.
She was also shown a fake mineral export permit purportedly signed by the Commissioner of Customs, a fake cargo insurance certificate and a fake C17B form declaring the items in her cargo.
The forged documents indicated that the cargo of 60kg, contained in a metal box and sealed in a wooden crate, would leave JKIA for Dallas on May 19.
Also recovered from the warehouse were sealed wooden crates that Shelby had been told were full of gold to be shipped to customers abroad.
When the detectives opened the cargo boxes, they found them empty, those that contained something were stacked with cement bags hidden underneath fabricated compartments of metal boxes and in others, assorted paraphernalia including toy frogs, old women's handbags and an old satellite phone.
The DCI has sounded an alarm over rising cases where foreigners are conned money by Kenyans operating with fake gold bars.
The DCI has also urged Embassies and High Commissions to advise their nationals coming in for business, adding that they should first contact the Department of Mines and Geology for a procedure that pertains to buying and selling of gold and other precious metals.
Kenya has become notorious in the gold trade business.
A recent Al Jazeera four-part series investigating Africa’s largest gold smugglers and money launderers stated a Kenyan has been running a similar scheme in Zimbabwe.