Men who steal from women

How times change. Some men now steal phones from women, instead of their hearts  on the first date, writes NJOKI CHEGE

The social camp where they met last Christmas was the last place she expected to meet a conman.

In fact, Mercy Obura (not her real name) felt the stirrings of romance when he began stealing glances at her.

Says Mercy: “He immediately took a keen interest in me over my friend Anita who is way prettier than I am. I was pleasantly surprised that he actually noticed me for my personality, rather than my looks.”

Compliments

But nothing could be further from the truth as Mercy realised on their first date when Antony wickedly revealed why he had been so interested in her.

Her excitement was palpable when he asked her out. When they met, he made her heart race by complementing her on her nice outfit, shoes and hairdo. And he also liked her mobile phone very much, he said.

“You have class. I like!” he said with a charming smile.

He then leaned over and requested for her phone so that he could savour the magnificence of the brand new Nokia N-Series she had bought days before attending the camp.

After placing their order — a king-size Hawaiian Pizza and soft drinks — the two chatted for a while Anthony fiddled with the phone, gleefully pointing out the features he loved.

About three minutes later, he interrupted their conversation saying, “These lazy waiters are taking too long to process our order. Why don’t I go and hurry them up?”

Innocently, Mercy agreed and Antony, with her new phone in his hand, sauntered to the counter to ‘hurry up the waiters’. Mercy did not bother to keep an eye on what was happening at the counter until it dawned on her that Anthony was gone — with her phone.

“I tried calling him using one of the waiter’s phones, but his phone was disconnected,” she says.

Mercy now believes Antony chose her over her prettier, curvier friend with ulterior motives.

“It all boiled down to who had the better phone, not figure, because my friend Anita had a kabambe (a low-end mobile phone),” she says.

But it is not just at social camps that lecherous men hang out. Two weeks ago, a young woman walked to her bus station in town, all teary and desperate, after a man she met on Facebook stole her phone.

The unidentified woman says that she was lazing about her desk at the office when she decided to log on to the social media site where a former classmate began chatting her.

 “He asked where I was at the moment and I told him I was at the office waiting for the rain to stop so that I could go home,” she says.

As any suave gentleman would, he asked her out for a date and they agreed to meet at a newly opened coffee shop along Moi Avenue in 20 minutes.

After placing their order, the guy started acting fidgety and upon inquiry, he told her that he was waiting for a brother from upcountry whom he suspected had been stranded in town because of the rain.

“He asked me for my phone saying his phone battery was flat. I gladly gave it to him, pleased to be of help. I mean, what reason did I have to smell a rat?” she says.

The young man took her phone, punched a few buttons, waited for a while, feigned ‘poor network’ and, with a frown, asked to step out of the hotel for better network coverage.

“That is how my high-end Samsung was stolen. In fact, I practically gave it away,” she says.

The man left the hotel, never to come back. When she tried calling using a waiter’s phone, she found both her phone and his were disconnected.

Although she knows his identity, she is, however, shying away from busting the crook on Facebook for the fear that he might expose her by publishing her nude photos stored on the phone.

“I am afraid that if I bust him, he might expose me and I am not ready to suffer the consequences.  The best I can do now is watch out every time I go for a date — that is if I will ever agree to one again,” she says.

But going by stories doing the rounds, the ‘Thieving Date’ is just riffraff, a chicken thief, so far as men who con women are concerned.

The smoother ones are more patient. So if he has not yet struck your phone or wallet, be careful once you get into that relationship. He just might have something awfully big cooking up his sleeve.

Women should particularly be wary of that handsome, elegantly dressed man with a golden tongue who showers them with compliments and cheap gifts. He could be a wolf in sheepskin.

They come in all varieties, armed with an array of excuses and great bedroom skills. One young man, for instance, lied to his new girlfriend, who was fairly well up, that his accounts were ‘frozen’ and, therefore, could not access his money.

In a moment of weakness, she offered a friendly loan, which he was to repay once his accounts were operational.  To date, she has never seen set eyes on him and his accounts are presumably still ‘frozen’.

Other men dupe women into buying property or establishing businesses registered in their names, after which the women are dumped unceremoniously and the men vanish into space.

In September of 2010, The Independent, a British newspaper, reported about a serial love cheat and fantasist who conned a string of lonely divorced women out of thousands of pounds. He was jailed for six years and ten months.

David Checkley, 52, left a string of broken hearts and large debts as he conned his victims, including one woman who lost her house.

From 2003 until he was finally arrested last October, the Grenada national dubbed “The Man with the Golden Tongue” arranged a series of blind dates on dating websites before spinning his victims a web of elaborate lies to gain their affection.

His tales included claims that he needed money for a life-saving operation in Switzerland to cure his Parkinson’s disease and that he had met “fellow sufferer” former TV star Michael J Fox.

Checkley also posed as a US fighter pilot who had served in Vietnam, despite being only 18 when the war finished. He told unsuspecting victims that he was friends with US president Barrack Obama and golfer Tiger Woods’ father.

If you are a divorced or separated woman, you better take extra caution because you are  most vulnerable and could easily fall prey to sweet-talking conmen who promise love and vanish with your purse.

Other unconventional methods used by these conmen include blackmail, to which several women have fallen prey. Such men blackmail women with either photos or videos of the two of them together, often naked. Worse still, they threaten to tell on their lovers, especially if the women are married or public figures, unless they part with large amounts of money.

Back home, who can forget the case of a man who convinced his girlfriend, a trained teacher, to pretend that she had been kidnapped and ask her father for ransom?

When police swooped in on the ‘kidnapper’s’ lair in Nyanza, it turned out the two were lovers who had been making out in a lodging all along.

So women, next time you are on a date with a man you just met, don’t let your guard down. Love at first sight is the newest con trick in town.

Guard your heart, your phone and wallet as well. He might just be a ‘Thieving Date’.