Following the murder of a man in broad daylight in Mirema on Monday afternoon, detectives from DCI’s Corporate Communications & Public Affairs Unit have been scouring the criminal database to determine who Samuel Mugoh Muvota was.
The details are astonishing. His files are completely rotten. Muvota’s closet has skeletons dating back to 2011, when he began stealing from victims at ATMs in various banks and progressed to a full-time thug who hired beautiful, expensive-looking women and used them as drinks spiking agents at various high-end entertainment venues.
Muvota, who ran an ATM and SIM swapping ring that operated like a mafia criminal organization, was a multi-millionaire with multiple real estate properties throughout the city, a fleet of vehicles, and seven wives who all lived lavishly off the proceeds of stupefied patrons in the city’s most popular nightclubs. Interestingly, none of Muvota’s wives suspected his double life.
So lucrative was Muvota’s trade that he had recruited over 50 beautiful women into his ‘Pishori’ administering trade, that has led to broken marriages, left many men admitted in hospitals and others dead from an overdose of a stupefying drug only identified as ‘Tamuu’ supposed to be administered to patients suffering from mental disorders.
After 11 years in the highly dangerous trade that has in recent days targeted patrons looking for entertainment in high-end establishments including top public servants, businessmen, politicians and men of the cloth, Muvota seemed to have made more enemies than friends. Detectives suspect that one of the women he had employed or an accomplice must have given him in to criminals after a deal gone sour.
According to Economic Crimes detectives who have previously handled his cases, Muvota was arrested for over 30 times in the past 11 years on fraud-related charges and had been in and out of almost all the courts in the city and in Kiambu county.
On most occasions, he would approach the complainants with a refund for their money and the cases would collapse.
He was widely known by cyber security specialists in the banking sector for the many times he fraudulently accessed clients’ accounts at city ATM’s sweeping the accounts clean.
Detectives believe that the thug worked with crooked banking officials who assisted him to clean up accounts in a matter of minutes. He particularly had a preference for Cooperative bank ATMs. The slippery thug also had connections with rogue officers at several police stations and whenever detectives launched a manhunt for him, he would be tipped off in time.
Muvota began his trade in 2011 by hanging around city ATMs and offering to assist customers who had difficulties withdrawing money from their accounts.
Working with crooked banking officials who would jam the teller machines once a client inserted his ATM card, Muvota would approach the client offering to assist.
He would insert the clients’ card then pretend to be facing away and ask the client to key in his password and first confirm the balance before withdrawing the amount they wished.
However, since the machines eject the ATM card first, he would get hold of the card as the unsuspecting client waited for the cash.
At this point, Muvota would swap the card with another and hand the happy client a fake card. Woe unto the account holder if the account had a fat balance since Muvota, would then visit different ATM booths withdrawing cash until the accounts were swept clean.
In a well-orchestrated scheme, Mugota would strike past 5 in the evening when he was sure that account holders would not walk back to their banks to inquire what the victims of the well-coordinated fraud visited their banks the following day to make inquiries into the fraudulent transactions, they would be met with apologies from equally hapless tellers.
Muvota who was clearly ahead of the cyber security experts in the banking sector, took advantage of products introduced by banks to make transactions easy for their clients.
In 2018, he transferred Sh700,000 from a woman he was assisting through Pesalink to one of his fraudulent accounts in a single transaction at an ATM in Kayole, leaving a balance of only Sh700.
When she met the Muvota, she was walking to the ATM booth to see if a loan she had applied for at the bank had been deposited in her account. She collapsed and died as soon as she realized what had happened.
Samuel Muvota, who had progressed to being the mastermind of the country’s ‘pishori’ syndicate at the time of his death, targeted wealthy patrons in the hope of a happy ending and operated in this manner.
