Durban - Criminals have popped the cork on other “criminals” trying to buy booze on the black market, fleecing several people of thousands of rand.
As many booze cabinets run dry, and South Africans wait for level 3 when alcohol can be bought again, several Verulam residents keen on a tipple lost thousands of rand to a man offering to help them buy liquor illegally but who then disappeared with the cash this week.
Prem Balram, of Reaction Unit SA, said the security company had responded to a number of call-outs this week after receiving reports that a man had stolen their cash without completing his side of the transaction.
Balram said shoppers had been approached by a man who lurked around bottle stores in the small KwaZulu-Natal North Coast town’s CBD.
“He offers victims a list of liquor, takes the order and their cash. He walks to the rear of a bottle store, pretending to buy the liquor, but disappears.”
He said the suspect had only been identified as Preolin. He was about 1.8m tall, slender, with an untidy appearance.
Balram later confirmed that the security company had located the man, but because no criminal cases had been registered because the sale of alcohol was a violation of the Disaster Management Act, the man had not been arrested.
“We asked the complainants to open a criminal case but there’s a possibility that the complainants themselves can be arrested. They opted to resolve the matter among themselves,” he said.
Smokers, too, have been scammed: the Independent on Saturday’s sister paper, the Daily News, reported that smokers have been duped into buying empty packets of cigarettes.
George Snodey, Community Crime Prevention Organisation spokesperson, said he was aware of people who had bought empty boxes in the Checkers car park in Seadoone Road in eManzimtoti.
“You give them the money, they give you the cigarettes and walk away. When people open the packet, they find newspaper and plastic inside.”
Earlier this week, police raided a homestead in Dududu on the KZN South Coast where a group of men were allegedly making alcohol and bottling it in Smirnoff vodka bottles.
National police spokesperson Brigadier Vish Naidoo said officers were informed of the “factory” but the men fled when police arrived. Police found 20 cases of sealed fake alcohol labelled as Smirnoff vodka and hundreds of empty bottles waiting to be filled. There were also two drums of alcohol at the scene.