Twitter Helped Stop a Carjacking

To most people, Twitter is just another social media site for sharing trite thoughts and links to random stuff found on the internet. But for a guy in South Africa, Twitter saved his car and possibly his life.

Twitter can be a great way to share a message with a lot of people in a short amount of time. This became very important to a man whose car was hijacked as he drove through Johannesburg. Thieves took his car and forced him to get into the trunk. What they didn’t know was that he had a mobile phone.

The man sent a text message to his girlfriend, who then sent a tweet to her followers on Twitter.

Her followers retweeted to their followers and then one sent the tweet to Johannesburg-based Twitter user @PigSpotter, who then retweeted it.

This Twitter account has more than 100,000 followers and usually tweets out the locations of speed traps and other law enforcement stings and traffic issues. But this time, @PigSpotter was on the same side as the police.

After Twitter users began to track and follow the car and law enforcement tracked the man’s mobile phone, police finally stopped the thieves with a roadblock within a couple of hours of the initial carjacking. The thieves ran away from the car, leaving the kidnapped man in his trunk. The incident ended well for the man and was summed up with this tweet below.

[via TNW]