Carjacking Victim Calls Out To Twitter – Gets Rescued
On one hand Twitter strikes many people as being senseless waste of time while others proclaim it as the best thing that has happened to social conversation. Regardless of which side of the fence you might sit on this there is no getting around the fact that as a communication medium Twitter has proven its worth more than once when it comes to disasters, emergencies, and social change.
None of this mattered however to a man who found himself being carjacked in Johannesburg and shoved in the truck of his car. Lucky for him though he managed to keep his cellphone with him during the carjacking and once the lid on the trunk had closed he shot a text message off to his girlfriend to let her know what had happened.
Lynn Peters (@onebadvillynn) did what has become second nature to a lot of us .. she reached out to her friends on Twitter asking for help (above image). While Lynn may have only hada small following one of those followers was smart enough to send a retweet request to @Pigspotter, a popular Johannesburg-based Twitter user with a 100,000+ following.
Even though @Pigspotter primarily used his account to update his followers with speed trap information this time his tweet had a lot more at stake. Within an hour of his retweet private rescue teams and security firms were involved in trying to track down the carjacked vehicle using nothing more than his the man in the trunk’s active cellphone t o trace his location.
Thankfully in the end everything worked out okay as the carjackers abandoned the car after coming up against a roadblock and the car owner was found safe and sound.
Speaking to local South African newspaper, The Star, @PigSpotter said, “I think this does go to show [how] effective a networking tool PigSpotter and in general Twitter actually is. This is not the first incident where someone has been rescued, or a vehicle has been retrieved as a direct result of tweeting me and it being RT’ed, and reaching the correct people at the exact moment.”
via The Next Web
Twitter status messages courtesy of The Next Web
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About the Author
Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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