Three alleged crooks caught stealing alcohol were forced to chug down their haul of booze after they were caught while trying to escape.

The trio, not named, were allegedly caught red-handed just a day after stealing the booze from a shop in South Africa.

But instead of calling the police, the owner and a few other men seized them and sat them down in a small room, where they forced the alleged thieves to drink the stolen alcohol to the last drop.

Stomach-churning footage shows the hapless perpetrators seated on a sofa as their captors, armed with metal poles, forced them to down bottle after bottle.

A man believed to be the shop’s owner stood in front of them with a leather whip, making sure they drank all the alcohol.

Onlookers can be heard shouting abuse at them while the men unwillingly downed the booze.

While two of them did not seem to be feeling the alcohol’s effects just yet, the third, dressed in a bright blue top, seemed to be on the brink of nausea or passing out.

The unusual punishment drew mixed reactions from users on X (formerly Twitter), with some making fun of the alleged thieves and others worried about what the alcohol intake might do to their health.

User ‘Egbe Sampson’ commented: “That’s a great punishment.”

And user ‘Mashiy’Amahle🇿🇦’ wrote: “After this, they’ll never wanna see alcohol again.”

But another named ‘Magoshi’ said: “[It] is very dangerous to force them to consume too much alcohol, they can end up dead. It happened in Limpopo few years ago, although that was a competition.”