By purportedly sweeping South African cities and towns clean of foreign dirt by means of Operation Fiela, public antagonism towards foreign spaza shops did not abate. If anything, the operation reinforced the perception of these shops as soiled and contaminated. By mid-2018 public distaste and disgust at the alleged unsanitary practices of foreign spaza shopkeepers was evident. Many South Africans had to a large extent internalised the repeated allegations that foreign shops and businesses were unclean and did not comply with laws. This was dramatically illustrated by the catapulting of an isolated incident in a small town to a national-level emergency that year.

On 11 July 2018 in Hartswater, a small rural farming town in the Northern Cape Province, a police investigation uncovered a factory manufacturing counterfeit products. The police discovered a range of goods being produced and packaged on site, including branded spices, baking powder, instant yeast, sanitary towels and shoe polish. Six Chinese nationals were arrested. To raise their awareness of their work, SAPS posted four photographs of the raid on its Twitter feed, with the caption:

No mention was made of the nationality of those arrested, or who their customers were. There was also no explanation as to how the police had come to estimate the factory's value at R77m. Photographs of the premises looked as though the factory was based in someone's run-down house, with one room containing old curtains and a wooden wardrobe. Two accused were released on bail of R5 000 and R10 000 respectively.

The brief and seemingly innocuous post immediately ignited intense reaction. Hundreds of comments containing furious claims and allegations against foreign shopkeepers were posted on the SAPS Twitter feed: ‘