A freight forwarder based in Cape Town who represents the interests of a shipper acting on behalf of the Howard G Buffett Foundation will be laying a charge of fraud with the police following a case of suspected container fraud.
According to Terry Gale, director of Gale Lotheringen Freight Consultants, he has been swindled out of R15 500 after securing a 20-foot container through a company (*) he believed was legit.
He said the container was bought in January to provide a client with a shipper-owned container destined for Rwanda where the foundation is busy with a $215-billion agricultural project.
“We looked at the containers offered by the company and were impressed by what we saw.”
Gale added that compared to several other options viewed online, the company in question “has a fabulous website with beautiful pictures, especially of 20-foot containers which aren’t easy to get hold of.”
Moreover, the purchasing price included delivery of the container.
Unfortunately that’s where courteous relations between Gale and the company stopped.
He explained that when he heard from his client earlier this week that the box was needed to be sent to SA Container Depots before it was sent to Kigali, he was contacted by another company who requested further payment of R8000.
They told him the payment was necessary to obtain a permit for moving an empty container as per 'provincial requirements' in Gauteng.
Gale said that’s when he realised something was "very strange".
“The emails I received, on a gmail address, looked very funny and I realised I had been scammed.”
Subsequent calls made to both companies, Gale claimed, had also been unsatisfactory.
When Freight News spoke to the CEO of the container company, he wanted to know who our client was.
When told the call was in the interests of right of reply, he gave a vague explanation of the latest charge being necessary to send the container to Cape Town before he threw the phone down.
A subsequent call was taken but immediately terminated.
Freight News has since confirmed that both companies are mentioned on consumer vigilance sites such as Hellopeter for similar complaints of container fraud.
Gale said it seemed to him that the containers ‘sold’ by companies like the one in question were copied from other websites and ‘marketed’ to the freight community who were hoodwinked by what they saw online.
He said he felt it was his duty, as chairperson of the Western Cape Exporters’ Club, to alert people to what had happened to him.
“Cut-and-paste scam sites”, as Gale called them, are nothing new. Freight News on a previous occasion warned the industry against website cloning when an advertiser, Speed Space, complained of scammers copying its website and intellectual property to con prospective clients.
Gale said because his own client couldn’t wait any longer seeing as the container was needed in Kigali, and especially because of the high profile of the foundation represented by the shipper, he had to accept responsibility for being scammed and would report the matter to the police.
(*) The names of the companies and the CEO spoken to has been withheld until the charge has been laid with the SAPS.
