With over 10,000 carjacking cases per year in South Africa, you're probably just as likely as not to get street-ganked on your way to work every morning. One South African man learned this the hard way in April 2012 when he set off in his Volkswagen Golf only to be robbed, carjacked, and forced into his own trunk by two armed men northwest of Johannesburg.
Luckily for the victim, these criminal masterminds forgot literally the only thing you have to remember when taking someone hostage -- they left him with his cellphone. The man immediately texted his girlfriend to explain what had happened, and true to the era in which we're living, she sought help, not from the police, but from her Twitter followers:
These twitterers then retweeted the tweet until it spread throughout the twittersphere (oh God, what is this shit doing to our language?) until it reached a popular tweeter by the name of PigSpotter (the account is normally used to warn drivers of police speed traps and road blocks around Johannesburg). When PigSpotter started retweeting, the alert reached 100,000 followers, including a large number of private security forces who had vehicles spread out all across South Africa. At that point, an Internet crusade became a real-life crusade: A volunteer security group called Riga Rescue lent its hands to tracking the victim's cellphone signal, and a company called K9 Security eventually caught a visual of the stolen vehicle.
Ironically enough, the car was stopped at a police roadblock 150 miles away from where the original crime had taken place (you know, one of those roadblocks that PigSpotter became famous for helping his followers avoid).
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"That'll do, pig. That'll do."
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