• Land transactions are dominated by corruption and fraudsters, as I have learned
I have never been particularly interested in owning houses and land, and I suppose in that respect, I am not a good Kenyan.
That is assuming being a good citizen of Kenya means always hankering after a “kaploti” even when you have no plans to develop it, and only want to use it as a surety against a loan to help you acquire even more land and property.
I am one of life’s eternal payers of rent and I know that must grate the nerves of some of my more acquisitive friends, even though they probably only comment behind my back.
I remember once in an effort to remedy this “sad situation” as some saw it, one of my well-meaning relatives organised for me to get in touch with a government official, who just happened to be in charge of allocating land in some land scheme.
This was very early on in my career, and the government official also happened to be a distant relative, but I had not interacted with them since childhood and had only come across them as a result of my work as a reporter.
My relative said the government official had been trying to reach me as they had a tip off about a story.
Always the news-hungry reporter, I set about getting in touch, but it seems I was too late.
On the same day after my relative called me telling me how to get in touch with the government official, a newspaper broke the story of a scandalous land allocation scheme.
In this scandal, the intended beneficiaries had been sidelined by well-connected friends and relatives of the very same government official I was meant to have reached out to.
I have always considered that a lucky escape. That said, in the interest of full disclosure, I do happen to own some property, but that came through inheritance rather than my own efforts.
Nowadays, it seems as if every day there is a report of some scam or another targeting people who can barely afford to get by on what little they have.
Even though it appears in many cases as if the scammers often manage to evade the authorities, every now and then the victims of the scams receive justice.
There was a recent case here in South Africa, where not only did the victim get her money back, but it looks as though the scammers will face justice, too.
The case in question involved a scam known as “business email compromise” or BEC, a sophisticated scam that targets both businesses and individuals who perform legitimate transfer of funds.
In the recent case, a judge in the High Court recently awarded R5.5 million (Sh39.7 million) to a house buyer whose email accounts were hacked in a case of BEC.
Using the proceeds of her divorce settlement, the woman bought a house from a third party seller, who appointed a well-known firm of attorneys as the conveyancer in the sale transaction.
She paid the R500,000 (Sh3.6 million) deposit required under the sale agreement and chose to pay the balance of the purchase price of R5.5 million by way of electronic transfer of funds directly into the law firm’s account, pending registration of transfer.
She made an electronic payment of the amount of R5.5 million into what she believed was the lawyer’s account, details of which had been emailed to her by a conveyancing secretary in the employ of the law firm.
Unbeknown to the house buyer, her email account had been hacked and the email containing the law firm’s account details was intercepted by an unknown fraudster and altered to reflect the fraudster’s bank account details.
This resulted in the funds electronically transferred by the plaintiff being deposited in the fraudster’s bank account as opposed to the law firm’s account.
I don’t have such amounts of money to play around with, but I can see now why there are some people who only trust cash. However, even that has its pitfalls, but that may be a story for another day.