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In March, last year, an Italian and a Polish hauled a Kenyan woman to court, claiming she separately obtained money fraudulently from each of them over a ‘fake’ pregnancy. Court documents and police records claim that Lynnder Achieng Ondago deceived each of the men that she was carrying their child and later alleged to have informed them that she had miscarried.
Documents obtained from her court file number 937/013 show that she obtained money from Polish national Tomasz Boguslaw under false pretences by lying that she was pregnant, and later miscarried, prompting the complainant to send her money for hospital bills to the tune of Sh90,000.
She again obtained another Sh60,000 from Boguslaw by again pretending she was pregnant a second time, by him, and had suffered a miscarriage. She also allegedly obtained Sh110,000 from Italian Armeno Cosimo Modugno by lying that she was pregnant and that she had miscarried.
“When she told me that she had miscarried, I immediately sent Sh25,000 via Western Union to ease her pain. The next day I sent an additional Sh85,000. I was in love,” says Armeno in his statement.
He claims he cut his holiday short and flew back to his house in Nairobi to nurse Lynnder back to health. He alleges that he went to his house and found that Lynnder had already left, and had taken away laptops, iPads, and other electrical appliances and Sh250,000 in cash. After she was arrested, a third man in the saga, a German thought to be to be Lynnder’s boyfriend (name withheld), is said to have flown to Nairobi to sort out the matter.
“You people are just jealous of my girl. I will support her as much as I can, because she is currently pregnant with my child,” said the German when this writer reached him on the telephone. He even offered to pay back all the monies spent on his supposed girlfriend and settle the matter out of court. She was released on a Sh300,000 bail which was quickly paid for by her German boyfriend.
In August last year, Danish businessman, Bo Jensen claimed 25-year-old Joyce Wanjiku conned him of Sh500,000. He unsuccessfully sued her, claiming he had all along been supporting her financially, yet she was using his money to cheat on him with another lover when he was away on business trips.
In December 2015, a Briton, John Thorogood, filed a complaint with the local police and Interpol, accusing Agnes Chepkonga Webermann of defrauding him close to Sh30 million. John, who claims to be suffering from colon cancer, also says he is in desperate need of cash to foot medical bills. The 62-year-old banker says, “I met Agnes in a bar in Amsterdam in January 2011 when I was just coming to terms with news of my cancer diagnosis. I became intimate with Chepkonga, 46, who by then posed as a real estate agent with business interests in Mombasa. I later discovered that she was a prostitute, trawling bars in Amsterdam and elsewhere in Europe, targeting vulnerable lonely old white men,” claims John, a father of three grown-up children.
The Briton and Chepkonga met a few more times before the Kenyan woman allegedly convinced him to finance the construction of a rental apartment in Mombasa that would be John’s source of income in retirement. With the deal struck, “Chepkonga flew back to Kenya acquiring a piece of land within Kanamai in Mtwapa. The five-storey building was to be registered in Chepkonga’s name since ‘laws of the country did not allow foreigners who had not stepped in Kenya to own property’”, John was allegedly told.
Meanwhile, John claims that, “money was sent regularly every month for construction from January 2011. Pictures, emails and her bank details will prove my financing and construction of the building,” he says.
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