The new online 'fakepreneurs' to watch out for

There was actually a time when idle men in this town had nowhere to hide.

Or, in the always immortal words of the Arctic Monkeys, there were no cracks to grasp or gaps to claw.

If you were like the Andy Capp cartoon character and 'couch-surfed' the whole day, or just lolled around the house waiting for the pool place at the corner to open at 10am so you can go improve your 'seven baller' game, you were pretty much treated like a lazy loser and given evil eye.

But technology has changed all that. With WhatsApp and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and SnapChat and whatever else is out there on and in the Internet that links us all, the man who will not break a sweat to do any real work in the world has avenues of escape into virtual realities, without the consequent loss of respect (especially from women) that ought to be the rightful price paid by these slovenly sloths.

So how can you scoop and sleuth out the new Internet Idler? I'll help you.

These days, and especially this season of silly but high stakes politics, you will find that 'Mondo wa Mkono' (MWM) who tells you he is an aide to several top politicians or a major political party – and talks like the next Nelson Mandela. But really all they do is write blogs and the most muddy bog (and imaginary scandals) about rivals that their paymasters tell them to write about.

I know a former investigative journalist who gets Mpesa of Sh527 every day at 6pm, Monday to Friday, to write utter rubbish about a major politician. Crap like the politician is 'a major sponsor of wizards and juju guys' in Western Kenya. He has to write at least five bogus posts daily of a hundred words each. Cheap, and darkly amusing – yet he tells women he is a 'mover and shaker in Kenya.'

Then there are the scam artists who are on phone from dawn to dusk, cooking up fake lotteries and conning naïve and unsuspecting 'winners', including women in the boondocks. It used to be a game for Nigerians (the kind who live ten of them in a Sh80,000 a month apartment, if they are Congolese they aren't cons but 'musicians' in search of cougars) but new Kenyan men have joined the game.

This 'fakepreneur' will tell you he is the manager of a new E-betting company, kumbe he is co-ordinating dozens of guys jailed in Kamiti to con other Kenyans.

Speaking of musicians, there is no idler more annoying than the fake artist. It is often some actor-type strolling around your apartment in a dressing gown (like who wears dressing gowns in 2017?), feeding a woman some yarn about his big starring role in a movie some friends of his are putting together 'in Chicago.'

Then there are the E-learner con geniuses who are ever printing prospecti and brochures of prestigious college campuses in the USA and the UK (why never India?) and leading a lady on about that full scholarship he's about to get from Yale. Come the sad day – of course she'll 'wait' for him, what is two years, with a long visit in December, when the future is almost here? – and he'll go to the airport. But he'll have borrowed Sh200,000 for 'airport and landing' expenses, and then she'll never hear from the fellow.

Till she runs into in a hardware stall in Kariakor in October, and it is true it is called 'Yale' (as used in the sentence 'yale mambo yaliyotokea zamani zakale').

Then there is a confidence trickster bunch of men, mostly invested in two Chinese designer suits and with beards cut in those straight sharp lines, who give themselves the 'CEO' title and are like socialite cum philanthropists. But only on social media. What they do is hang around hotel functions, preferably next to personalities like in our 'Eve Social Scene,' see, be seen, then play confidence games on women.

But unless you are in high school, girl, no woman should take a chap who says he is 'investing in betting' as anything other than a joker. The EPL is football entertainment, not a stock exchange for viewers.