SilentEcho’s story

My uncle just retired from customs and this still hurts to think about because he’s not even someone who uses the internet much, he just got a smartphone after retirement because people told him to “enjoy life and connect with people” and one day he started chatting with this woman he met on Facebook who seemed really kind and soft-spoken and said she lived in another city in Kenya, they talked for weeks and nothing seemed strange, she would ask about his day and his health and make him feel seen after retirement which is already a lonely time for a lot of men, then one day she said she got into a car accident and sent pictures of herself in a hospital bed with bandages and wires and all that and he panicked because she had been talking about coming to visit him, so he sent money to help with hospital bills, then after that it became a pattern where every few weeks or months there was another complication, another surgery, another emergency, another doctor bill, another delay in recovery, and each time he felt responsible because he thought if he didn’t help her she might die, and this went on for about 15 months, slowly draining his retirement money, his savings, even money he had set aside for building a small house back in the village, and by the time a family member noticed something was wrong and checked the chats, the total amount he had sent was around 1.5 million KES (Kenyan Shillings). After we found out, one of my cousins who works with the police helped take the case seriously because at first it felt like one of those things people just say “forget it, the money is gone” about, but they actually traced some of the transfers and phone numbers and it turned out the person was never a woman at all, it was a young guy running the scam with a few other people, and they eventually caught him. When my uncle was shown the person who had been pretending to be this injured woman for over a year, he didn’t even shout or react the way you’d expect, he just looked tired and confused, like his brain couldn’t match the face in front of him with the person he thought he was helping, and even though some of the money was never recovered and the whole process was stressful and slow, what hit me the most was seeing how gentle my uncle became after that, like the world suddenly felt less safe to him.