Detectives drawn from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) unearthed how a sting operation led to the arrest of a Sugoi-based musician who impersonated Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua to solicit money from unsuspecting Kenyans.
Collins was nabbed by detectives in civilian clothes at Kipleting market whiling away his time on a game of pool with his friends.
They had traced his phone to the village in Sugoi, Uasin Gishu County and established that he is a local artist.
The detectives were seeking to establish the man’s motive in impersonating the DP and put a stop to the fund drive he was carrying out on the page “for hungry Kenyans”.
They had also devised a cover story that would lure him to their vehicle after which they would escort him to Nairobi for questioning.
The cover story was that they needed him to perform at a nearby establishment and he needed to accompany them to negotiate the deal ahead of the performance, a trick he fell for line, hook and sinker.
But before they could go far, Collins overheard one of the officer’s conversations on phone, sensed that he was under arrest and attempted to flee, which he managed albeit for a few hours.
The musician tried to pull some drama to escape the police dragnet, but he was overpowered, bungled into another car, and driven to Nairobi for questioning.
In his confession to detectives, Collins said that’s when the thought of impersonating the DP hit him, he said he did not know that Mr Rigathi had any social media presence and that found him an easy bait to use to earn followers then convert the page to his stage name “Reng Star”.
After starting off by wishing people a good day, he later realised that there was an official page for the DP, began pasting its images to his followers and the page numbers swelled to now 14,000.
A week before the DP launched the National Steering Committee on Drought Response and implored salaried citizens to set aside a percentage of their salaries towards hunger relief, Collins replicated the message in his own wording on his page.
“Good evening Kenyans should we gather something for our fellow Kenyans suffering from drought? Let us come together and do a public harambee for them it will assist them for some time be blessed so much as we support them,” reads the post published on November 17.
The DP launched the committee on November 25 and three days later announced the setup hunger drive pay bill number 880990 to allow Kenyans to donate cash to drought victims.
A day after this, Collins posted his personal Standard Chartered Bank account number on the fake page and a pay bill number for unsuspecting Kenyans to donate towards the “same” course.
“Pay bill_329329. Account number _0100434508800. Let us help them, God will bless you,” the post stated.
Interestingly, Kenyans had mixed reactions to the post. While a good number piled it with insults, a few including a man who confessed to having fallen for the scam, deposited Sh30,000 to the pay bill.
He realised he had been conned when the DCI shared the news about Collin’s arrest on their social media page that fateful Sunday.
On his part, Collins told detectives that while he would have spent the money deposited by gullible Kenyans to grow his music, the only notification he received on his phone was informing him of a Sh6 bob deposit made on the same day he shared the account number.
