The user, who unleashed a lengthy thread explicitly detailing her association with the said individual before he made a disappearing act, was at her wit’s end, unable to trace a man she had grown to trust and who now had disappeared with her Ksh. 2.5 million.
Kesh was accusing a man going by the name Hellen Evans Muriithi, who she claimed to have been conducting business with, saying that, due to the complex nature of sending money from abroad, she would give Evans cash money which he would then send to her mother via MPESA.
“I usually give him cash then he sends it via Mpesa to my mother,” she said. “So at some point, he had my trust. So, on Friday, I had an emergency. I needed Ksh.2.5M urgently and the amount I had was less than one million, so I asked my mother to send it to me,” she wrote.
Kesh went on to explain that, because of her difficult working hours, coupled with the long distance, she contacted her friend Evans to handle the transactions for her. He agreed.
Things, however, started getting testy after Evans went offline just after receiving the Ksh.2.5 million from Kesh’s mother. This led Kesh down a frantic mental hole, as she desperately attempted to reach him hours after he had promised to drop off the cash to her “in 20 minutes”.
“After an hour, I started being uneasy, his phone was off. I texted a number of times but the messages were not going through,” she wrote.
“A few minutes past midnight, the guy responds to my texts saying he had drunk some vodka and blacked out…But my instincts were acting up, still I decided to give him benefit of doubt.”
Kesh added that after a night of intense worry, she asked him to share his location so that she could go pick up the cash herself. Again, he switched off his phone, further aggravating her fears.
As a last desperate resort, she said that she tried calling his workmates to ask about his whereabouts – they all claimed to not know where he lived.
“It’s at this point my instincts went totally off. I tried checking out details about the transactions. He had withdrawn the cash!” she wrote.
“I went to the police… they said he had left (today) in the morning around 8:30am. He went on transit to Saudi Arabia as the police informed me. I knew it’s over since he left UAE so he couldn’t be traced anymore.”
To sum up her thread, Kesh said that Evans was then on transit to Kenya, adding that she was anticipating his arrest soon after he had landed at the JKIA.
“He’s currently flying to Kenya and might arrive tonight or has already arrived. I’m waiting for his arrest as soon as he arrives at JKIA,” she wrote while tagging several investigative bodies including the DCI Kenya and the Immigration Department.
After a month of silence, the saga resurrected online, with claims that Evans Muriithi, the alleged culprit, had since died under mysterious circumstances after the incident was published by his accuser.
Reports of Evans’ supposed death ricocheted off the X microblogging site for the better part of the weekend with many users even sharing funeral photos and a crisp obituary of him too.
But as the week kicked in, some quarters started raising questions over the actuality of Evans’ death, with many now claiming that the man accused of running away with millions of his friend’s cash had actually faked his own death and had used the ploy to evade justice.
“Huyu jamaa ako hai. Maybe he paid a few broke fellows in Meru to stage-manage his death. All those photos are of paid actors. Utakuta jamaa ata ameanza a whole new life under a different identity. Evidence of his death is very sketchy. Kuna kitu hatuambiwi hapa,” one X user posted.
As the mystery deepened, another user even went ahead and offered a Ksh.50k cash reward to anyone with actual proof that Evans was dead.
When interviewed about her book, “Playing Dead: A Journey Though the World of Death Fraud”, American author Elizabeth Greenwood was asked what might prompt people (read criminals) to fake their death.
“Of course, the people to whom you owe money are going to be looking for you,” she said. “If it’s a case where you have defrauded investors, they are going to be angry. A lot of the people I interviewed who faked their death owed some kind of debt to various banks or people in terms of loans and mortgages.”
She added, “These guys usually think they’re the smartest guys in the room and that’s why they can do it. Unfortunately for them, they usually get caught pretty soon.”
