In an event that has come to be dubbed the real Kenyan Money Heist, the meticulous nature of this operation has left many in a distant state of awe. The shocking case of where a staggering amount of over 300 million was credited to the wrong account/s following a misleading order from an unfortunate case of a phish-attack is definitely one for the big books.

According to reports, events are all expected to have been set rolling when the finance managers and subordinate staff of the Fairfax County local government indicating that he/she is an accountant official from Dell who was requesting them to settle some payable balance they had pending with the company. Prior to this,  The regional government of Fairfax County had been conducting a capital-intensive computer supply scheme in a bid to digitize the local public school system.

In response to this, Fairfax reacted by sending a sum total of $1.3 million in small installment bits, believed to be 28 installments, from the months of August to September way back in 2018. The installment figure was not standard, because, according to sources, sometimes Fairfax would send amounts as low as $300 to outrageously high amounts of figures tipping around $250,000.

It is also quite evident how careful the scammers were with this operation given that there is a healthy amount of evidence showing that the were numerous email exchanges to clarify that the amount should be sent to a new bank account and not the previously used one.

Little was the county aware that all these funds were money was looped in a convoluted entanglement that started in an account in Ohio ended up in an account in Nairobi, Kenya, where it was promptly withdrawn. A total sum of $520,000 was discovered to have been transacted from Fairfax and withdrawn from an anonymous account in the busy dwellings of Nairobi, Kenya before the local government discovered that this was a fraudulent dealing.

Upon heavy probing, a 60-year-old suspect, Robert Muli (a Kenyan immigrant who lived in Ohio) admitted to Alexandria federal court that he was in cahoots with people from his native country to defraud a number of American local governments, Philadelphia and Detroit being some of the ones which claimed victimhood of the operation.

This led to a slew of investigations which were led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who landed in Kenya and focused their investigative prowess in Nairobi in an operation which was later dubbed Operation reWired which widened its scope to accommodate other related cases. This later led to the arrest of 281 suspects form numerous countries who were operating from the Kenyan capital.

A tentative total of nearly $3.7 million was confiscated as a result of this operation as well as the disruption of approximately $118 million in potentially fraudulent wire transfers. Since 2013, the FBI has uncovered that a sum total of $10 billion has been fraudulently lost in a similar manner from American residents alone. The figure is even more mind-blowing in the case where the global sum total is taken into account with there being an approximate $26 billion loss in a similar nature since that date.

Interestingly, Kenya and Nigeria are the only two African countries which are in the list of nations where such grave fraudulent cybercrime cases happen, company to the likes of such nations as Italy, Japan, Malaysia, United Kingdom, and France. This has been made easy given by the fact that both countries are digitally progressive with pioneering advancements such as fast internet speeds and access to cheap and fast computers.

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