Scammers call capital victim with new threat
Ged Cann goes behind the scenes to find out how used bottles become packaging. See video at dompost.co.nz.
Phone scammers who tried duping people under the guise of being New Zealand’s ‘‘Federal Police’’ are now harassing the Wellington couple who blew the whistle on them.
Jagdish Prasad spoke out about being targeted by the phone scam because he and his wife were concerned more gullible people would fall for the trap.
As a result, the scammers have called the couple several times, abusing and threatening them for highlighting the scam, he said.
Prasad claimed their plight was made worse by a lack of help, with police and telecommunications provider Spark unable to track down the culprits.
Police confirmed they investigated multiple incidents earlier this month in which scammers were impersonating an officer.
The scammers tell victims one of their family members has been arrested, and that they need to pay the officer cash.
Vodafone and Spark said scammers were able to manipulate their caller ID so victims believed they were answering a loved one’s call.
Prasad said he received a call earlier this week ‘‘threatening me’’ for exposing the scam.
‘‘For the next 20 to 30 minutes, the caller kept calling. He called me names, asked why I was informing people about their scam, and that I should stop drawing attention to it.’’
Spark blocked all incoming international calls to Prasad’s cellphone. ‘‘When I questioned a Spark representative what they are doing to protect their customers, they had no clear answers,’’ he said.
‘‘The Government needs to get involved and deal directly with the country from where these calls were being made. This is just not good enough; not even the police can do anything about it.‘‘
A Spark spokeswoman advised customers to reach out to police if any issues progressed from a nuisance call to a harassment situation.
‘‘We’ve had a number of conversations with Mr Prasad and have taken him through the options. We appreciate that, due to the technical nature of the issue and the scope of what internet providers like Spark can do, Mr Prasad has not had the outcome he would like.’’
Police said it did not appear Prasad had contacted them about the scammer’s harassment.
It can recycle 6000 tonnes of plastic bottles every year, and it’s also the first factory in New Zealand capable of turning the material back into food-grade packaging.
The Flight Plastics factory in Lower Hutt churns out meat trays, biscuit trays and fruit punnets – all to customer order, all designed on-site, and all stamped with the words ‘‘New Zealand recycled’’.
Director Derek Lander says there is a huge difference between that and the ‘‘recyclable‘‘ label.
‘‘Recyclable means someone else can deal with it, New Zealand recycled means we are dealing with it here.’’
The difference also equates to about 10,000 fewer kilometres travelled, with most other plastics shipped to Asia for recycling.
‘‘Then we have to buy it back. We have this massive pile of material here that we can now use, and the other options are: it goes to landfill or on to the beach or the park.’’
The site, which was previously the Griffin’s biscuit factory, was bought in 2008. Operations began on a smaller scale in 2010.
The process begins when 400-kilogram bales of bottles – bought from recyclers across the country – arrive in the factory’s yard.
The bales are broken apart and any non-PET bottles are separated out.
A high-speed camera looks at every bottle at it shoots along a conveyor belt at 30kmh. As the bottles cascade on to a second belt, any non-PET plastics are forced out by blasts of compressed air from a row of nozzles.
Their labels are removed during a hot wash, which also sterilises the bottles. From here, the bottles are broken down.
Because their caps are a different material, they have to be sorted as well. This is done in a float tank, with the lighter polypropylene caps floating to the top, where they are siphoned off.
The caps are then sent to another recycler and the pure PET is melted down, moulded into long sheets, with a skin of virgin material applied in order to bring it up to food-grade.
Now the sheets can be pressed into the various containers and packaging types created by the factory.
PET is like glass, Lander says, and can be recycled time and time again. ‘‘We can take bottles, reuse them, and then we can take our product back and reuse it again.’’
Lander says one of the most common objections he has heard to recycling is a disbelief that the material was reused, with many convinced it was simply dumped.
‘‘If we can get this publicised and people can see where their recycling is going, we’re hoping people will make more of an effort to get their items into the recycling scheme.’’
There is still room for growth, and with about 20,000 tonnes of PET being imported every year, there is no shortage of material waiting to be recycled. ‘‘This is what New Zealand wants.‘‘
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