There has been a huge spike in internet banking fraud in the past two months, according to a recent report in the Herald Online.
Port Elizabeth commercial crimes unit head Andre Horak said 30 cases of internet fraud, totalling more than R800 000, had been opened since the beginning of February.
He said this was more than half of the 59 active cases, totalling more than R3-million, that his investigators were working on.
The Herald said it had learnt of at least six people, who are First National Bank (FNB) clients, who fell prey to internet bank fraud in the last week and a half.
One Port Elizabeth woman said she had had more than R6 000 electronically transferred out of her FNB account. ”Luckily I have an SMS notification on my account, so I was immediately notified and contacted the bank to cancel the transaction,” she said.
Her manager, however, had more than R20 000 transferred out of his account, while another colleague was hit for an undisclosed amount of money.
Meanwhile, two people from Uitenhage had fallen prey to internet fraud, with one of them losing more than R84 000.
Another woman became the third party in an internet bank-fraud scheme when she was ”employed” by a foreign business to handle bank transactions.
The company offered her a ”front-line manager” position, which required her to provide it with an empty bank account, into which it would pay a large sum of money that she had to withdraw and transfer overseas.
The R29 730 paid into her account, however, turned out to have been obtained from internet bank fraud and had been illegally transferred from an account in Cape Town.
FNB said it was aware of the recent cases that had been reported in the Nelson Mandela Bay area and was evaluating each case individually. — Sapa