A South African man, whose name has not been published, was
carjacked, robbed, and stuffed into the trunk of his car near
Johannesburg on Sunday. The robbers, however, had overlooked his mobile
phone, which he used to text his girlfriend, Lynn Peters. From there, Twitter took over.
Two armed men grabbed the driver and his Volkswagen Golf in the
Honeydew area northwest of Johannesburg at about 9:00pm local time.
Carjacking is a crime that is common in the country—over 10,000 such
incidents occurred last year.
Peters immediately tweeted, “Be on the look for DSS041GP my boyufriend [sic] has just been hijacked and is in the boot please RT.”
RT they did, including Peters’ friend, Tanisha Reddy. From her it was picked up by well-known SA Twitterer, @pigspotter,
who retweeted it to his 100,000-plus followers. @pigspotter specializes
in identifying and sharing the location of police roadblocks. The
police forces in South Africa have frequently been accused of graft and
violence, so it does not seem to be criminals alone who make a point of
avoiding roadblocks.
Because @pigspotter’s followers include a large number of private
security forces, whose vehicles are spread around the country, the Golf
was located. Units were notified and in many cases sent out, each team
and company retweeted the specifics of their search and kept each other
apprised and informed on Twitter.
