Five employees of the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (Cipro) have been suspended for alleged fraudulent activities, the company said on Friday.
The fraud suspects allegedly cloned businesses on Cipro’s database to defraud them, Cipro chief executive Keith Sendwe told media in Rosebank, Johannesburg.
”The cloning scam was only recently uncovered and a special multi-disciplinary task team has since been appointed by the management of Cipro in order to conduct a full investigation into the extent of the problem.
”Our aim is to bring those responsible for crime to book and to put a watertight action plan in place to prevent any future reoccurrence of the heinous crime,” said Sendwe.
He said a number of companies registered with Cipro suffered financial losses through the cloning scam but declined to reveal the amount involved.
A forensic audit was under way to establish how much money companies had lost through the scam.
Cipro’s chief information officer, Michael Twum-Darko, said investigations were undertaken earlier this year following the discovery of 143 suspected fraudulent activities on Cipro’s system in December last year.
”One hundred and forty three people were found to have performed irregular activities in our system. and following investigations the five employees were found to have been involved in fraudulent activities,” said Twum-Darko.
The five fraud suspects have been reported to police and investigations are under way.
Sendwe said a number of systems had been put in place to safeguard companies registered with Cipro from fraudulent activities.
”Apart from bringing these fraudsters to book, the management of Cipro is doing everything within its power to further improve and strengthen systems and processes in order to combat fraudulent activities,” he said.
This included a customer-verification system.
”We recently launched the customer-verification system whereby customers need to be verified and authenticated by a registered commissioner of oaths before they will be allowed to effect electronic changes on their company profile.
”This intervention will go a long way in assisting us in rooting out fraudulent activities,” he said.
Cipro registers businesses and intellectual property rights and maintains related registers. — Sapa