Deceived and abandoned: pain of tourists at the hands of false agents

Scammers posing as tourist agents have scammed hundreds of tourists from various parts of the world, threatening the image of Kenya as a tourist destination.

The scammers use fake online campaigns, complete with good reviews and economic tourism packages to attract foreigners who make advance payments before being abandoned in Kenya once they arrive and pay the rest of the cash.

50PC DEPOSIT

The Sunday Nation also learned that the cartel, which is deep in the industry, has perfected the art of evading law enforcement by changing names, staff and tourist vans before resurfacing during the seasons High to attract millions of defenseless tourists visiting the country.

One of the latest victims of this scam is Chen Dong Yuan, a 51-year-old Chinese engineer from Changsha, who could not have been more excited to take advantage of the direct flights launched by China Southern Airlines in June to visit Kenya.

Kenya praised the airline's biweekly flights from Changsha and back to Nairobi with its 330-200 Airbus aircraft, added to nonstop flights to Guangzhou, as one of the biggest impulses to its tourism sector with prolific tourists from China, ranked by The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) as the world's leading tourism spender in 2017.


Chen had no idea what awaited him and his five friends in Nairobi after planning and paying a 50 percent deposit to Kenya Walking Survivors Safaris Limited for eight nights in different tourist locations across the country. That was in early July.

His plane landed on the morning of July 31 and his lifelong dream of taking a nine-day tour of Kenya began with a driver from the company that quickly picked them up from the airport.

“We went to his officers where I paid $ 2,820 (around Sh295,000), which he insisted should be in cash. Then we depart to Amboseli for two nights according to the itinerary. We had the vehicle but the driver changed out of Nairobi. On our way back, the driver told us that the company that delivered us had suddenly closed and that our trip could not continue unless we made new arrangements, ”Chen told Sunday Nation, beginning his tragic history of tourists in the hands of scammers. . In a foreign country and in the middle of a tour, a sudden stop was unimaginable. His online guide (Mr. Otieno Lysaniash), who also received the money when they arrived, had turned off his phone and, true to the driver's words, the office located at Vision Plaza was closed.

RETURN THEM

Mr. Chen decided to complete the trip when the driver suggested that if they paid more, he would take them to Maasai Mara, Naivasha and Nakuru according to the previous plan. They agreed and paid, doubling the budget of their tour and turning a happy trip into a fight to defeat the cons and survive any other attempt to defeat them. The driver, Stanslaus Ongeri, told Sunday Nation that the company only hired him as a freelance and that he did not know the whereabouts of its owner, Mr. Otieno, who also claims that he lost Sh25,000 in unpaid expenses.

The scam victims only had Mr. Ongeri after they were abandoned. Given the limited time they had and the commotion that came with the first attempt to stop their trip, they had no choice but to trust him even to report the matter to the police, despite the distrust they developed towards him for having been part from the company that scammed them.



In Maasai Mara, they met another group of tourists who immediately identified the driver and tried to hit him.

They had been scammed by the same company and Mr. Chen's group was needed to protect their driver from angry tourists, and