Man charged with conning a car seller while posing as a woman
A man accused of conning a businessman while posing as a female customer interested in purchasing his car has been charged at the Kibera law courts with obtaining money by false pretenses.
Bob Ngome Nyongesa is accused of obtaining Sh150,000 from Said Mwangi Ali after falsely pretending to be a potential buyer of his Mercedes Benz car which the complainant had advertised for sale on an online marketing platform.
Nyongesa was convicted for a similar offence in 2012 by a Kakamenga magistrate.
He posed as a prospective buyer of the vehicle on the online site and had a conversation with Ali while purportedly traveling from Narok to Nairobi to see the vehicle.
According to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), Nyongesa expressed a willingness to buy the motor vehicle, a Mercedes Benz at Sh1.4 million from Ali.
He asked for more pictures of the vehicle posted on the online platform, before traveling to Nairobi where they would seal the deal.
Convinced that Nyongesa was a serious buyer, Ali sent him more photos including the interior and other parts of the car.
Nyongesa is said to have later contacted Ali to inform him that he had hit several cows and goats belonging to Masai herdsmen and he needed some money to settle the matter before he was lynched.
The suspect allegedly sent Ali images of livestock carcasses lying on a road and his purportedly damaged vehicle to convince Ali.
Nyongesa who was posing as a woman told Ali that the herdsmen were on the verge of lynching him if he failed to pay Sh150,000. He asked Ali to send him the money promising to refund while buying the car, after accessing banks in Nairobi.
He stopped communicating with Ali as soon as he received the cash.
Nyongesa was arrested by detectives from Langata DCI offices at his home in Rongai on April 10.
He is said to have been posing as a white woman by the name Ryan Britney to defraud unsuspecting Kenyans.
The prosecution told the court to consider that Nyongesa is a convicted fraudster and several people came out to lodge complaints against him after he was arrested.
Nyongesa denied the charges before senior principal magistrate Esther Bhoke. He was released on a surety bond of Sh300, 000 and an alternative cash bail of Sh200, 000.
The case will be mentioned on April 23.
In the previous case where he was convicted, Nyongesa was charged with the offence of obtaining money by false pretense contrary to section 313 of the Penal Code.
The particulars of the offence were that on the 26.11.2012 at Lubao area in Kakamega Central with intent to defraud, he obtained from Mohammed Abdallah Osman a sum of Sh250,000 falsely by pretending that he could sell him gold to wit six kilograms a fact he knew to be false. He was convicted of the offence and sentenced to serve 18 months imprisonment.
He appealed at the Kakamenga High Court and lost in the appeal before Justice Said Chitemwbe in a ruling delivered on September 18, 2014.