Two German nationals living in South Africa, but with overseas bank accounts, have been targeted by banking scamsters using personal identity and banking details, which were apparently leaked by a government department.
On December 22 last year, Rolf and Luise Lohrmann received a query from their bank manager in Germany regarding a faxed request from Luise to deposit more than â,¬25 000 into a company bank account in Indonesia.
The Lohrmanns instructed their bank manager not to proceed with the transaction and to fax the request to them in South Africa. The faxed letter contained Luise’s perfectly forged signature and a copy of her SA identity document.
Rolf explained that the couple had renounced their German citizenship in the 1980s to become South Africans. When, in 1991, they decided to reapply for their German citizenship, they were required to return their South African passports and books of life to the South African Department of Home Affairs. This is the only way the scamsters could have obtained Luise’s ID book.
Home affairs national spokesperson Nkosana Sibuyi said all identity documents returned to home affairs were destroyed, and he could not understand how anyone could have gotten hold of the ID book.
The fax sent to the German bank was sent from a number registered to a Johannesburg-based engineering company, Vanguard Rigging. This week, the company said this was not the first time its fax number had come up in a scam.
Lohrmann said he had considered the possibility that the personal information might also have been leaked from the Reserve Bank’s amnesty unit, as the Lohrmanns had applied for amnesty regarding their overseas bank account.
The amnesty unit’s chief operating officer, Jannie Rossouw, refused to discuss the case, citing the confidentiality that governed amnesty applications.