Police officers last Sunday arrested over 130 individuals who presented themselves at the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) Training School.
The hopeful youths had turned up for KDF training with fake calling letters.
“During the reception, we discovered that 130 had letters which cannot be authoritatively confirmed to have been issued by KDF. We are handing the owners of those letters to the civil police to carry out an investigation,” said Brigadier Martin Ong’oyi.
The recruits are said to have been defrauded in what military officials are calling a recruitment scam. They are said to have been defrauded of a total of over Ksh.50 million in the scam.
Brigadier Ong’oyi said the conmen collect between Sh50,000 and Sh250,000 from each person they give admission letters.
According to one of the would-be recruits, he turned up at the KDF training school despite knowing his letter was fake as he had not turned up for the recruitment exercise in March.
The individual further added that he was handed the letter by a military officer from Lang’ata barracks in Nairobi.
Another claimed that he even quit his day job at the prospect of landing a military job.
“I had already told my Indian boss that I was resigning because I had got a military job. What am I supposed to tell him now?” lamented one of the would-be recruits.
The recruits, drawn from various parts of the country, were handed over to the Kenya Police on standby and driven to the Eldoret Police Station for further questioning.
Two individuals suspected to have been selling fake KDF admission papers had earlier been arrested in the same region.
The number of those with fake letters this year has risen to 132 from last year’s 65.
