Last month, while businessman Festo Ivaibi, the founder of Mitroplus Labs, was driving back to his home in Segguku along Entebbe Road, three cars suddenly encircled his.
Some of the occupants came armed with rifles before putting him at gunpoint. He was led away blindfolded and forced to sit in their cars.
“I was in the back seat, and two people were pressing my head down; they were telling me they were from the army, and they were taking me to a torture house. They asked for a ransom but not cash,” Mr Ivaibi recalls.
The businessman said his captors surprised him when they told him that they knew he was a businessman who deals in cryptocurrencies and that he had a lot of money. He said they went ahead and demanded that I transfer USD 500,000 (about Shs1.8b).
“They took my two iPhones, which gave the perpetrators access to USD120,000 worth of the stable coin ( about Shs450m) and USD18,000 (about Shs67.5m) worth of Mitroplus Lab’s meme coin, afro token,” Mr Ivaibi said.
He somehow got glimpses of his captors when they removed the piece of cloth that they used to blindfold him, for the purpose of forcing him to unlock his phone to gain access to his cryptocurrency accounts.
After the robbers were done with their mission, they dumped the businessman about 11 kilometers away from his home.
He says he had no money on him, but he managed to walk to the Nansana Police Station was the nearest, and reported a case of robbery.
Speaking to this publication at the weekend, Kampala Metropolitan Police Spokesperson Mr Patrick Onyango said seven suspects, including five UPDF officers and an official with NIRA, have since been arrested.
“The suspects were tracked and arrested by officials from the Defense Intelligence and Security, formerly the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI),” Mr Onyango said
Adding: “The Suspects, using the database system from NIRA, retrieved sensitive information of a businessman and later robbed him of Shs480m on gunpoint. The suspects used the information to track the movements of the businessman and obtain location coordinates over a period of time.”
The Police detectives said the NIRA official collaborated with a well-known cryptocurrency broker to recruit UPDF officers to execute the robbery and kidnapping.
Detectives said, during the interrogation, the suspects revealed that they accessed wallets with a few that lacked multi-signature authentication.
The suspect informed police that the remaining funds were on mobile phones, which they dumped in a pit latrine soon after the criminal act.
“We have written to NIRA about their personnel, and they said they will terminate his contract,” the detective said.
The investigative agencies are now said to be working to retrieve the devices from the pit latrine.
