A community Facebook page has been so successful at identifying petrol thieves that some have been scurrying back to service stations to pay up before CCTV footage is posted online.
Businessman Tony Taylor set up Kaikohe Community Watch last July because the town had had "a total gutsful of tagging, vandalism and disrespect".
Since then, its successes include identifying the youths who robbed a 70-year-old woman of her handbag, catching the teenage suspect in an armed robbery of a liquor store, naming taggers, locating lost children, reuniting lost pets with their owners, and now reducing the petrol thefts which had plagued the town's service stations.
Senior Sergeant Chris McLellan, of Far North Police, said thefts in the Mid-North town, especially petrol drive-offs, had fallen as a result of the Kaikohe Community Facebook page.
In the first week after page administrators started working with a Kaikohe service station, five people had returned to pay for petrol because they didn't want to appear on the Facebook page.