Daniel Hutchinson From The Hutch

It's funny what gets people's blood boiling, and fraud is right up there with the most heinous crimes of all.

Even thinking about the various forms of fraud makes my face flush with righteous rage.

In fact just this week Mrs Hutch and I were victims of one of the lesser known, but no less despicable frauds - wheelie bin fraud.

You see we have a bin provided by a private contractor and once a week, first thing in the morning, we wheel it out and place it by the side of the road.

Shortly afterwards our worldly waste disappears to become one with the Earth again. We wash our hands and try to be better next week.

To be fair, we seldom fill even half a bin but that depends on what activities we have been engaged with.

Blind fury

Nevertheless, neighbouring villains have been taking advantage of our bin in the mornings. No sooner is the back turned and someone is stuffing their filthy detritus in our private receptacle.

Usually this goes unnoticed, but when someone simply flings a pot of butter chicken in there or over stuffs the bin so it won't close, it offends our senses and sullies our reputation.

So you can imagine the anxiety when not one, but two bags of trash appeared in the wheelie bin, after it had been emptied!

The cheek of these devils knows no bounds.

In a blind fury I slipped a pair of safety gloves on and set about a forensic examination of the trash. I was determined to catch these criminals and make them pay.

It turns out one of the bags was deposited there by my very own brother, who is staying with us at the moment but he had a very good excuse.

Playing detective

You see there was already a large bag of rubbish in the bottom of the bin, so he naturally assumed the bin had not been emptied yet.

Which left the other bag. I was able to form a fairly good profile of this offender based on their penchant for ready meals and the single empty prophylactic wrapper. Alas, I found no proof of their identity.

So I left it there and vowed to watch my bin like a hawk next week. Maybe even booby trap it with a giant fist-shaped jack-in-the-box. The plan appeased me, but not Mrs Hutch, who also noticed the crime when she returned home.

No fewer than three neighbours were forced to look in the bin, then look her in the eye and deny all knowledge. Eventually the police-style interviews ended, but we are pretty sure we know who didn't do it.

Parking tickets

Tauranga's motorists have usually been through some sort of trauma on their journey, before they get to the stage of actually parking their car.

So, the latest act of fraud to hit the streets really is a new kind of low point for society - fraudulent parking tickets.

Someone has been printing up fake tickets and placing them on cars in the hope that motorists who have never had a parking ticket won't be able to tell the difference and will pay up. They are almost as bad as real parking tickets.

The flaw in this scheme, of course, is that there are no motorists who have never received a parking ticket from Tauranga City Council.

Evidence of this was in the guilty eyes of those recently polled by SunLive when asked if they could spot the difference between a real ticket and a fake. Everyone was very confident of being able to tell the difference.

Personally I have had half a dozen parking tickets over the past yeast or so, and while I take no pride in this particular statistic, I do feel that if everyone made a similar contribution to the council coffers, there would soon be enough money to demolish the new parking building on Harington St.

Once that's done, the council could then build a new parking building on Harington St, therefore making the lives of motorists - and alternative transport types - that much easier.

Listen and learn

Lastly, and I'm not sure if this fits into the fraud category or not, the commissioners who run the Tauranga City Conundrum (I'm not sure we can still call it a council) made some very promising noises at their first meeting this week.

They promised to listen to the public and also had some stern words for council staff about improving the lines of communication on controversial projects.

There won't be any relitigation of previous controversial decisions made though - like the new rubbish system - but at least that will put an end to the scourge of wheelie bin fraud once and for all.

daniel@thesun.co.nz