A Zimbabwe man has been arrested for driving off from a service station without paying a cent for more than a thousand litres of fuel.
The suspect, 43-year old Joseph Chirunga has now been arrested and charged with fraud, reports the Daily News.
The paper says Chirunga last week conned a Harare fuel station attendant Joseph Siyakurima into filling a tank pulled behind his Dyna truck with over a thousand litres of diesel before pretending to pay for it using a mobile phone transaction.
“Siyakurima did not thoroughly check the authenticity of the proof of payment he had received and Chirunga immediately drove from the scene,” said the Daily News.
Siyakurima’s boss noticed the shortfall the next day, and realised that the thousand litres of diesel hadn’t been paid for.
Chirunga was later arrested, although he had already disposed of the fuel.
Fraud is on the rise in Zimbabwe, where 96% of transactions are now done electronically with debit cards or mobile phone money due to chronic shortages of physical US dollars.
Last month local banks and police warned that fraudsters working in cahoots with shop tellers and service station attendants were behind a spike in the cloning of debit cards used by customers, according to the state-run Herald.
