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Of all the vehicles on the road, a truck carrying a nice load seems to be the most lucrative option for hijackers at the moment.
To get their hands on these massive freight vehicles and the goods they carry, hijackers have had to up their antics. Truck hijackings have been on the increase every year, which means these criminals certainly are getting the hang of things.
The Citizen reported on Statista stats stating that in 2023, there were 1,996 truck hijackings in South Africa, an increase over the previous year. Truck hijackings have more than doubled since 2012 when 821 incidents were reported.
A representative from SA Truck King said that the food transportation industry is under attack:
“It has just been getting worse. A couple of months ago 4 400 hampers were made to be taken to Cape Town and the hampers were loaded in two trucks. Both the trucks were hijacked and all the hampers were stolen,” said the company’s Afzal Hamed.
“Loads that are being hijacked are things easy to move like groceries. Sugar and oil are being hijacked a lot, as well as nappies and cold drinks,” explained Hamed.
He mentioned that one tactic popularised among truck hijackers is to simulate a police ‘roadblock’, with hijackers dressed in police uniforms and using police-marked cars to get the trucks to stop.
Empire Security Solution is sure that truck hijackings are often inside jobs, where the hijackers know what the truck is carrying before planning to stop it, and often already have buyers waiting on the other side.
“Truck gets hijacked, they use a jammer to jam the tracking system. The truck gets taken to a warehouse where the truck is offloaded. The empty truck is then taken and dumped somewhere. There is big money involved. These guys are very strategic in their planning.”
Another modus operandi is making a woman hold out a baby on the side of the road to appeal to the truck drivers’ emotions and get them to stop and ‘help’.
CEO of the Road Freight Association Gavin Kelly confirmed these terrible trends, per The Citizen, adding that the myriad of tactics to steal trucks makes the crime harder to prevent.
Besides the usual violence, intimidation and damage tactics that most South African drivers are aware of when it comes to hijacking, Kelly advises that truck drivers have a whole other ball game to worry about.
Some truck hijacking methods might be to:
- Pretend that their vehicle has issues and stop trucks/cars to ask for assistance.
- Create an “accident” between vehicles or pedestrians and ask for assistance.
- Say they are being chased by criminals and request a ride away from the scene.
- Create a medical emergency and request assistance.
- Create false accidents/incidents/road closures.
- Claim the truck has crashed into their vehicle and request the vehicle to stop/ claim someone else crashed into the truck.
- Claim a route is closed and send the truck on a route towards a high-jack group impersonating authorities or emergency services.
- Pretend to be police/traffic and do a routine vehicle stop.
- Claim the vehicle is unroadworthy and must follow the police vehicle/ claim defects on the vehicle and “impound”.
It is a great pity that criminal syndicates use such tactics that dissolve any remaining trust that South African citizens might have for each other and the authorities. Who do we trust under such conditions? Hardly anyone.
Unfortunately, that means people who are actually in need won’t get any help.
[source:citizen]
