“He Had 7 Wives”: DCI unmasks dark life of slain thug Muvota shot dead in Mirema

More victims whose documents were found in the car of the slain Kasarani man identified as Samuel Muvota have come out to state they were stupefied before being robbed of money.

Three of them recorded their statements on Wednesday following the fatal shooting of Muvota on May 16 in Mirema, Kasarani in Nairobi.

This was after being called by the police.

Muvota 40, was fatally shot by a lone gunman at Mirema Drive in Kasarani, Nairobi County shortly after dropping off a friend.

The owners of three of the seven documents found in the man’s Honda CR-V said in their police reports that they were victims of drugging.

According to police, one of them is a university lecturer, another is a Thika-based businessman and the third is a resident of Roysambu.

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They lost almost Sh1 million, their statements said.

Thursday, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations said Muvota’s files stink to high heaven.

The findings have revealed skeletons in the man’s dark life dating as far back as 2011 when Muvota started stealing from victims at ATMs in various banks. He is said to have graduated to a full-time thug who hired beautiful, expensive-looking women and deployed them as drinks spiking agents at various high-end entertainment spots.

According to police, Muvota headed an ATM and SIM swapping syndicate that operated like a mafia criminal organization.

He apparently was a multi-millionaire with several real estate properties scattered across the city, a fleet of vehicles and seven wives all living lavishly from proceeds of stupefied patrons in clubs most frequented by revellers.

Interestingly, none of the wives suspected that Muvota lived a double life.

So lucrative was Muvota’s trade that he had recruited over 50 voluptuous damsels into his ‘Pishori’ administering trade.

This led to broken marriages, left many men admitted to hospitals and others dead from an overdose of a stupefying drug only identified as ‘Tamuu’.

The drug is 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, the DCI said.

Detectives suspect that one of the women he had employed or an accomplice must have given him into criminals after a deal gone sour.

According to Economic Crimes detectives who have previously handled his cases, Muvota was arrested 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.

The DCI says 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 he worked with crooked banking officials who assisted him to clean up accounts in a matter of minutes.

He also had connections at several police stations and whenever detectives launched a manhunt for him, he would be tipped off in time, police suspect so.

According to the DCI, 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 client’s 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.”

In a well-orchestrated scheme, investigations have shown he would strike past 5 in the evening when he was sure that account holders would not walk back to their banks to inquire what was happening to their accounts, since messages of withdrawals they had not made would keep streaming into their phones.

The ever-busy hotlines operated by banks most of which go unanswered, wouldn’t be of any help to the helpless clients, as alerts of unsanctioned transactions kept coming all night.

By the time 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, at an ATM in Kayole, he transferred Sh700,000 in a single transaction from an account of a woman he was assisting through Pesalink, to one of his fraudulent accounts, leaving a balance of only Sh700, investigations have shown.

The woman had walked to the ATM booth to check whether a loan she had applied for at the bank had been deposited in her account when she met the Muvota.