Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form. Please try again.
In June 2025, whilst conducting research in the mining town of Kimberley, South Africa, I stumbled upon a nefarious scam in which people believing that they were investing in a legitimate mining enterprise were robbed of their money. Kimberley has always been a mining town, and it has always been a city of contrasts; contrasts between rich and poor, between those with the world at their feet and those trampled underfoot. My notebook for 13 June 2025 notes the following:
Whilst three Tic addicts sit behind a parked car in Currey street, a meeting is going on in the reading room on the first floor of the Kimberley Club.
In June 2025 Walker Swindell and I visited the Kimberley Club in downtown Kimberley to confirm the arrangements for a conference dinner that was to be held in the Club.[1] As we were about to leave, I spotted a plasticised A4 that indicated that a meeting for “Acacia Gold” was taking place upstairs in the “Reading Room” of the Kimberley Club.
“Acacia Gold” was a company I had heard of in Tanzania, but not in a southern African context.[2] Whilst we were looking at the sign a man of about 50 walked past and set off up the stairs. I asked him if he was part of the meeting taking place upstairs and if “Acacia Gold” was in some way related to “Anglo-Gold”.[3] He said that the meeting had ended but that we were welcome to join him and that he would introduce us to the man who had organised the meeting. I asked him once again if it was related to Anglo-Gold, and he said no, that this was a new mine, and that it was a serious thing in which both the South African Government and the Federal Government of the United States of America were involved. This was news to me, particularly as I had not heard of the development of a new gold mine in South Africa, and issue that would certainly have gotten my attention[4] With this in mind Walker and I took the man up on his invitation and climbed the stairs to the Reading Room.
Having climbed the stairs we approached the door of the Reading Room. I saw elderly people that looked like retired civil servants or school teachers taking food from a buffet. The food consisted of small hotdogs and sausage rolls. The man who had invited us upstairs introduced us to a man who said that his name was Bryan Jones, a man of about 55-60 years of age, slim and bald he appeared to have been a teacher. In the second sentence of his introduction Bryan Jones stated that he was affiliated to Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley. In the room, around the table, about 15 people, all of whom were people of colour, and all about 50 and above in age.
On the table plasticised A3 and A4 printed forms and flyers detailing the wonderful investment opportunities that were available. Essentially the idea was that one would buy into a set of machines that would then be rent out for a set amount of time and at a fixed rate, after which one would be paid back again, with enormous profits being possible in excess of 200% and running up to a staggering 585%.
As we left the room and returned to the street outside the Kimberley Club, I said to Walker that the whole process was most certainly a scam, a pyramid scam most likely. Walker agreed and stated that the man named Bryan Jones had said that he had made ZAR 1Million in less than six months.
Back home I started looking at the website of Acacia Gold.[5] The address listed on the website turned out to be for a clothing store in Los Angeles. For Acacia Gold there was only one single email address. On the website, which had been cobbled together from a set of stock photographs, the CEO of the company is presented as being John Rockefeller and Sophia Loren is presented as a member of the company’s board. However the profiles listed are all without a photograph and without contact details. The site, which was taken down on 30 July 2025, also had a video clip of a man purporting to be John D. Rockefeller who introduced himself as CEO of Acacia Gold who spoke with an East European accent. All the photographs on the site are all stock photographs, or images taken from other legitimate sites. The site claimed that the company had discovered a gold mining site on the Witwatersrand and posted a link to a Pdf of an open access article published in 1995 dealing with the mineralisation of the Witwatersrand.
There were at least fifteen Facebook groups associated with Acacia Gold.[6] Of which Acacia Gold SA / Retail Miner Network & Earnings Club, established on 3 June 2025 appeared to be associated with the scam in Kimberley itself. In addition there were other Acacia Gold Mining groups on Facebook that were established on 3 June 2025. One Facebook group, established by Mark Anthony Myburgh on 1 June 2025 at 6:14 pm, entitled Acacia Gold Club which had the following posting, “Sundays are for promoting. We out here brining in new people to this amazing opportunity (sic!)”. Of the Facebook groups one site was particularly disconcerting as it consisted essentially of countless photographs of hapless investors who had invested in the scam.
It is clear that the scammers consciously used the Kimberley Club to create an atmosphere that would impress, dominate and intimidate those that were about to be scammed. The people who attended the meeting would have been aware of the fact that the Kimberley Club is a place where wheeler dealing took and takes place.[8] It is the site of power that intimidated and intimidates those who have no power. For those carrying out the scam the costs of the setting that is the Kimberley Club are minimal, possibly $100,- at most.
On the 30th of July 2025 the Acacia Gold website went off line. The apps that people had downloaded ceased functioning, and the money that they had invested in what appeared to be a legitimate mining enterprise disappeared. The Facebook pages associated with Acacia Gold began disappearing, often with heartfelt comments from desperate punters, “Hi guys I'm leaving this group you should do the same”. [9]