As South Africans waved goodbye to 2020, they looked forward to 2021 with a lot of anticipation that the year would not be filled with the same challenges that had to be dealt with over the previous 12 months.
Unfortunately, this has not materialised, and the Southern African Fraud Prevention Service (SAFPS) points out that the fraud risk landscape is growing by the day.
“We are really reaching a critical point when it comes to the economy and the extreme measures that criminals will use to perpetrate fraud,” says Manie van Schalkwyk, CEO of SAFPS. “The 2020 statistics, collected by the SAFPS, indicate that there are significant increases in key areas and that there is a long road ahead to address this challenge.”
He says fraud in Eastern Cape increased by 161% and fraud in Gauteng increased by 120%. “There were increases in every province with the exception of Limpopo,” says Van Schalkwyk.
The SAFPS reports that an area which saw a major increase was fraud listings which increased by 62%. In addition, victim listings up by 54%.
“2020 was a year of major disruption as many employees were told that they had to work from home,” Van Schalkwyk says. “The problem with this is that employees are now conducting their work, and in some cases sending sensitive information, across servers that do not have the same level of security as the servers at their normal place of business.
“The Fourth Industrial Revolution is driven by data and cyber criminals are conducting targeted attacks on servers to steal valuable data and use it to commit fraud. We saw this in the Experian and Absa data breaches last year. The fact that there is a significant increase in victim listings could be because of an increase in data breaches.”
Perhaps the most concerning statistic coming out of the recent SAFPS report is that impersonation fraud has increased by 337%, Van Schalkwyk says.
“This is extremely concerning. Impersonation fraud is the act of a criminal impersonating another person by stealing their identity and then open accounts in their name.
“The fraudster has details of the victim and is trying to take over their account. The credit provider will ask the questions normally asked to the account holder. Because of data breaches, this information is available to the fraudster making it easier to take over the account. They then take over the account and leave the victim with massive amounts of debt that they never took out in the first place.”
He adds that technology has also improved significantly, and it is currently very easy to make a fake application look legitimate.
The SAFPS also reports that industry savings by companies that make use of the SAFPS database increased by 86% to R4,4-billion.
Van Schalkwyk urges companies who are not yet members of the SAFPS to visit www.safps.org.za to find out more about how they can become a member and get the benefit of a shared fraud database.