Food coupon forgery scam
2010-01-28
CRIMINALS have become so sly that they have even gone to the lengths of professionally faking food coupons. This came to light last week, when employees of Spar supermarket and their adjacent liquor store, Tops, in Church Street Wellington, noted that all was not well with coupons which were being exchanged for food and alcohol. These coupons are part of the supermarket chain’s savings program. They are sold for R10 each and the public who buy these generally use them at Christmas to supplement their salary. But it has been noted that various people have been using thousands of rands of these coupons over the past month in payment for foodstuffs and alcohol. According to Spar owner, Andriesa de Bruin, the criminals obviously became lax with their spendthrift, and staff noticed that the stamps were not cut smoothly. This was brought to De Bruin’s attention and she was astounded to see that the stamps were forgeries. “The forgeries were so good that at first glance they looked like the real thing.” However, on closer examination, the ink had slightly smudged on some of the coupons, and the edges were not as straight as they should be. When the fraud was discovered, two people were arrested in Spar in connection with the forgeries. CCTV footage shows a man and the woman buying large amounts of especially alcohol, allegedly with fake coupons. This led to the discovery that thousands of rands worth of goods had been exchanged for these fake stamps. The two suspects claimed to have bought the stamps from somebody else. Due to lack of evidence, they have been released, but the police are hopeful that further investigation will lead to the source of the forgeries.
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