MTN and the SA's specialist crime-fighting unit, the Hawks, are on the trail of a gang of cellphone thieves that is making its way across the country.
This comes after a spate of robberies at MTN stores in Gauteng around October last year shifted, first to KwaZulu-Natal and, more recently, to the Western Cape.
Lily Zondo, MTN SA's GM of business risk, says the operator has had to institute a number of measures to safeguard its stores, staff and customers from future attacks.
"Measures are ongoing. We have deployed our own security guards at our shops, over and above the guards deployed by shopping centres. We have also added safety measures like time-delay locks and we have closed off the front of our stores from the back, where the robbers usually hold staff and customers during a robbery."
Zondo says the company is also training staff on how to react should an incident take place.
Despite reports that the group is targeting MTN specifically, Zondo says it is not a matter of the company being singled out, per se. "I don't have the stats of my counterparts, but we do work with them in terms of curbing robbery and I don't think it's totally an MTN phenomenon."
She says the robbers typically steal cellphones and money from the cash register.
A successful project undertaken with the Hawks in Gauteng, says Zondo, forced the gang out of the province into others. "So we are replicating the action we took there in other provinces that have become targets."
Hawks spokesperson Paul Ramoloko was not available for comment at the time of publication.
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