Revealed: How police busted suspected Mombasa porn ring and took in 11 women

By Murimi Mutiga.

A concerned resident of Simba Estate in Nyali, Mombasa a few weeks ago reported to police officers in the area that he suspected one of his neighbours, a middle-aged woman, was pimping young women to foreign men, and also asking them to market their sexual prowess using webcam technology.

Police took up the matter, and investigated the allegations.

A break-through in their investigations came on Thursday, July 11, when 11 women were allegedly busted in the suspected pimp’s house marketing explicit sex acts via videoconferencing technology.

On the other end of the internet, police say, were foreign men keenly following – on their computers – the live sex acts that the 11 Kenyan women were performing on themselves.

In online circles, what the 11 suspects were allegedly doing is called Webcamming.

Webcamming is quite an easy market to enter; all it takes is a computer, a decent webcam, access to a high-speed internet connection and a webcam hosting site.

The hours are flexible, the working environment is safe and the salary, according to online academic platform, The Conversation, can be very rewarding.

The majority of performers are women, but there are also male and transgender performers.

On sites such as Chaturbate and MyFreeCams, a tipping system operates in public chatrooms. Here, payment is voluntary, and performers are tipped for performing sexual and non-sexual acts. This makes a show profitable for the performer, at a relatively low cost to the viewer.

In private chatrooms, performers are paid by the minute for a private show. Here, the customer can make requests for specific sexual acts to be performed. Unlike the public chatrooms, these performances tend to be highly pornographic.

In both public and private shows, performances can be highly interactive. Performers and customers are able to communicate with each other using keyboard, speech and two-way cameras.

Police say they suspect the 11 young women, arrested in Nyali on Thursday, were engaging in Webcamming.

The suspects were arraigned at the Shanzu Law Courts on Friday, July 12, where the magistrate allowed detectives five days to detain the women.

Also arrested and arraigned, were the suspected pimps and owners of the Nyali Webcamming business identified as Merceline Atieno and Enock Ochieng.

Police claim Atieno runs a Chaturbate account in conjunction with an international live video-streaming company called Multi Media, LLC.

Authorities further claim, during their raid at Atieno’s home, they recovered 16 laptops, several cameras, mobile phones, flash disks and dildos suspected to be the paraphernalia used in the illegal sex business.

Senior Principal Magistrate Florence Macharia directed that police detain the 11 women and their two masters for five days to give room for investigations into their alleged porn-shooting acts.

The Prosecution had asked Senior Principal Magistrate Macharia to deny the suspects cash bail because, if set free, “they would most likely interfere with evidence”.

“We are asking this court not to grant the suspects bail. We fear that if they get released, the suspects might interfere with investigations. They might log in to their accounts and erase the crucial evidence. The exhibits recovered also need to be taken to cybercrime unit at the DCI headquarters in Nairobi for analysis,” argued the Prosecution.

The magistrate directed that the suspects be detained at Nyali Police Station until July 16, when they will be taken back to court to take plea.