Paris-based anti-fraud firm Evina has determined that one out of every three mobile subscription attempts in South Africa is fraudulent.
South African cellular users are very often subscribed to mobile services without their consent, the company says.
After Kenya, South Africa is the African country most affected by fraud that daily fleeces millions from the mobile accounts of cellular users around the globe.
“As Africa’s most advanced economy, it is particularly tragic that South African mobile users are falling victim to subscription frauds that are well managed in many other countries,” says David Lotfi, CEO of Evina.
Fraud is not treated seriously enough by the various mobile payment actors and this can be seen in the fact that 31% of mobile subscription requests in South Africa in July were fraudulent.
Evina’s has determined that South Africans are mostly at risk from a very basic fraudulent mobile activity, clickjacking.
“Clickjacking is a type of mobile-based fraud that is more than five years old and could be blocked very quickly if local market players took this threat seriously,” Lotfi says.
To a lesser extent, South African mobile users are also targets of a whole range of nefarious applications commonly available for app store download and these include everything from flashlight to wallpaper, pedometer, file manager and video maker apps.
Evina secures over 12-million daily transactions across 60 world markets. It provides telcos, merchants and payment gateways with proprietary DCB (direct carrier billing) technology that prevents malicious mobile apps from making payments.