Hawks investigators are widening the net in search of Swereen Govender, a Gauteng woman who’s evaded police since 2021 when she disappeared with R18 million in investment capital.
UPDATE: After a year on the run, Swereen Govender, a 55-year-old woman accused of running a multimillion fraud scam on unsuspecting investors, was arrested by the Hawks on Friday, 7 October 2022.
“She was arrested at a Lodge in Mahathma Gandhi Road in Durban, where she was found in the kitchen, apparently working. She offered no resistance when approached by the detectives from Durban Central police station, led by Brigadier Vish Naidoo, to whom the wanted suspect is known by sight,” Hawks spokesperson Captain Lloyd Ramovha said.
How Swereen Govender pulled off an R18m heist
In a statement, Hawks’ spokesperson, Captain Lloyd Ramovha, revealed Govender has been missing since mid-2021, and it’s believed she’s been hiding right under the noses of authorities.
“She is believed to be still in the country, possibly around KwaZulu-Natal province,” Capt. Ramovha said.
Govender, whose background is unknown, allegedly lured several investors into believing she was a director of Aurum Line, a personal protective equipment company.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2021, it’s believed Govender enticed investors with a potential venture to scale with Aurum Line.
They, at the time, were in a prime position to benefit — or so they believed — from the demand for PPE during a global health crisis.
While the merits of Govender’s proposal are still unknown, Hawks investigators believe the woman had conjured up a good enough con to fool investors into pumping R18 million into the venture.
Of course, Govender was neither a director of Aurum Line nor was the venture worth investing a dime. It simply did not exist.
According to Capt Ramovha, the alleged fraudster maintained contact with investors for a while after she’d received the capital. However, alarm bells soon rang off when every promise she uttered about high monthly returns was a farces.
“The victims grew tired of empty promises as she did not keep her end of the bargain,” the Hawks revealed.
Arriving late to the realisation that they’d been conned, the investors opened a case at the Hawks office in Johannesburg, and it didn’t take long for investigators to determine that they’d been swindled.
“It became apparent that she falsified her documents for the sole purpose of extorting funds from the unsuspecting victims,” Ramovha added.
More than a year after Govender seemingly fell off the face of the earth with R18 million in liquid cash, investigators are nowhere near tracking her whereabouts.
For the first time since the case was opened, the Hawks have turned to the public for assistance in identifying the elusive swindler.
The most authorities have at this time is the possibility that she may or may not be hiding in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). Govender, it’s believed, is a prime suspect in several other open cases.
This is a developing story.