Card fraud to increase over festive season
Publish date: 07 December 2006
Issue Number: 42
Diary: Legalbrief Forensic
Category: Corruption
Highly-organised syndicates with overseas links were operating in SA and defrauding customers, and the situation is expected to get worse over the festive season, when twice as much money will be circulating.
Business Day reports this is the warning from Gilbert Swats, CE of the SA Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric), who, along with representatives from Absa, First National Bank, Standard Bank and Nedbank, have warned that SA was following international trends in experiencing increases in banking-related crimes, namely ATM crime, credit card fraud and identity theft. He appealed to banking customers to be careful particularly over December. Card-related fraud is conservatively estimated to be costing SA banks R50m a year. Senior Superintendent Janneman van Week of the SA Police Services Commercial Crimes branch said that while forms of electronic fraud used to take six months to reach SA, it was now taking six weeks, which required the police and banking industry to constantly monitor new trends. Full Business Day report
