The story of two close friends now bitter foes — Noel Akivembe, 51, and Mildred Lujiri, 49 — is one that is riddled with allegations of greed and betrayal.
Ms Lujiri is accused of conning her childhood friend Ms Akivembe millions of shillings — taking advantage of her desperation for a husband to scam her, according to police investigations and court filings.
Ms Lujiri is claimed to have hatched a scheme to fraudulently siphon money from her friend totalling to Sh2.8 million while pretending to be a Mr Daniel Ochieng, a man who was seeking love and marriage.
She reportedly organised a meet up between Mr Ochieng, who she claimed to be a relative, and Ms Akivembe before he allegedly travelled to finalise his studies abroad.
In the suspected scheme, the man would in a series of apparent misfortunes contract Covid-19, get quarantined, suffer a broken spine before being imprisoned in a foreign country— all meant to trick Ms Akivembe into sending money to him, according to detectives.
In her account to the police, Ms Akivembe said she briefly met a man who introduced himself as Mr Ochieng sometime in May 2021 through her friend Ms Lujiri.
She was overjoyed to learn that the “ideal” man was interested in marrying her. But police investigations now indicate this was after all her friend Ms Lujiri’s plan to defraud her.
After the meeting, the alleged scheme took a twist when Mr Ochieng supposedly left Kenya a few days later ostensibly to further his studies in Singapore. He was to return in August the same year.
In the meantime, Ms Akivembe and the person she thought was Mr Ochieng continued to communicate on the phone through messages and even exchanged photographs but with no phone calls. The photographs supposedly of Mr Ochieng would later be part of the police probe.
Ms Akivembe would later tell the police she came to learn she was all along chatting with her friend Ms Lujiri who pretended to be Singapore-based Mr Ochieng.
By the time he was to return from abroad, Ms Akivembe was blindly in love with Mr Ochieng and considered herself to be in a long-distance relationship.
According to a statement she recorded with the police, Ms Akivembe’s anxiety was met with bad news when Mr Ochieng informed her that a passenger in the plane he was travelling in back to Kenya had supposedly died of Covid-19 and the plane had to make a stopover in Qatar where they were all quarantined after testing positive for the virus.
This is when Ms Akivembe started sending money she thought was for her supposed lover’s treatment. But she allegedly sent all the money to Mr Ochieng through her friend, Ms Lujiri, who was the go-between.
In the arrangement, Ms Lujiri was then supposed to send the money to Mr Ochieng via a money transfer application.
Ms Akivembe’s M-Pesa statement showed that in the month of August alone in 2021, she had sent Sh1,017,230 to Ms Lujiri. The money was meant to cater for the Covid-19 treatment.
"Since then, I have been sending money whenever he asked me to facilitate his treatment, including Sh140,000 on August 29, 2021," she wrote in her statement to the police.
After Mr Ochieng reportedly recovered, Ms Akivembe said her supposed lover, who was to come to Kenya in November 2021, then claimed he had broken his spine and was forced to be flown to India on December 18, 2021, for surgery.
He was supposedly given a 10-day temporary travel document within which he ought to have been treated. Ms Akivembe sent money she believed was to take care of the bills.
However, Mr Ochieng’s story took yet another twist when he was allegedly arrested by immigration officers in February 2022 for what he said was an expired travel permit since the treatment had reportedly taken longer than expected.
Ms Akivembe had to borrow Sh600,000 which she promised to refund by March the following year.
However, despite sending the money, Mr Ochieng was allegedly not released from an Indian prison. A concerned Ms Akivembe wrote to the Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary for intervention.
In a letter to the CS dated March 19,2022, she claimed Mr Ochieng was in prison on the grounds that he had no travel documents.
She also wrote in her statement to the police that her supposed lover had told her he had been sentenced to two years in prison or he pays a fine of Sh200,000.
Mr Ochieng was supposed to refund the money he had borrowed and when he failed to do so, Ms Akivembe was reported to the police over the debt. She was arrested and charged with fraud.
However, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations found that the two numbers — one supposed to belonging to Ms Lujiri and the other one Mr Ochieng’s — were being used by the same person in Nairobi. An M-Pesa trail showed that the money sent to Ms Lujiri was never forwarded to any person outside Kenya.
In addition, the person whose photos were sent to Ms Akivembe as being Mr Ochieng denied knowing Ms Lujiri. He claimed to be a political figure who had nothing to do with the scam.
After a two-year search the police tracked down Ms Lujiri at her house in Nairobi and arrested her on May 24. She was taken to court on May 27.
Appearing before Nakuru Principal Magistrate Ruth Kepha, Ms Lujiri was charged that between August 5, 2021 and August 17, 2022 with others she induced Ms Akivembe to transfer to her through M-Pesa Sh2,869,287.
She denied the charges and was released on a Sh1 million bond. The case will be mentioned on June 11.
