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Criminals also have overheads - Freight & Trading Weekly - 14 July 2000 edition -
- Freight & Trading Weekly
14 July 2000 edition
Criminals also have overheads
Stolen goods are sometimes more expensiveTHIS IS how the criminal syndicates work.
Level 1 comprises legal businesses which receive the stolen goods. Many of them buy legally from the suppliers, but also buy from crooked suppliers. Once the goods enter this level it is impossible to identify that they are stolen because the shop owners produce receipts from the legitimate supplier.
Level 2 are the orchestrators of the criminal syndicate. They operate as logistical planners. They create the market for the stolen goods while Level 1 are the receivers of the stolen goods.
Level 2 also rents several warehouses to which Level 4 - the truck driver (if he is part of the syndicate) - delivers the goods. Alternatively Level 3 will drive the truck into the warehouse if it is a real hijack and the truck driver is a victim and not part of the hijack.
The goods are spread between several warehouses to avoid a SAPS raid recovering all the stolen goods.
Once Level 2 has found a buyer, the goods are then moved to Level 1 which releases them into the market via the legal trading business they have.
The forum's investigations have revealed an interesting fact - that the network also has an overhead cost which results in the buyer in Level 1 sometimes paying Level 2 more for the stolen goods than he would if they were bought legally from the supplier overseas.
In one example, an importer said that his cost to land a particular pair of shoes in South Africa was R15,00. The person who bought the same shoes from the orchestrator paid R20,00.
A trucking company transported the goods between warehouses and the receivers. It is not known whether the drivers were aware that they were trucking stolen goods.
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