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- Losses attributed to digital banking fraud in SA increased by 45% in 2021.
- Fraud related to card-not-present transactions, like online shopping, increased by 31.5%.
- ATM bombings increased by 11%, and more and more use explosives now.
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Digital banking fraud cases slowed down in 2021, but fraudsters are helping themselves to larger sums of money when they reach their targets. According to the South African Banking Risk Information Centre's (Sabric) annual crime statistics for 2021, released on Monday, incidents of digital banking fraud decreased by 18% between 2020 and 2021. The biggest decline occurred in mobile banking fraud.
But while the number of incidents declined, there was a 45% increase in total gross losses for victims of digital banking fraud.
"Criminals have adjusted their social engineering tactics to leverage your data from social media and data leaks, making their efforts to manipulate customers difficult to spot," said Sabric CEO Nischal Mewalall.
The other growing area targeted by criminals is card fraud, especially for card-not-present transactions. These are transactions where people don't have to present a physical credit card when checking out at online stores, for instance. This type of fraud increased by 31.5%, thanks partly to fake websites springing up on all corners of the internet. Physical debit card fraud contributed to 55.3% of all card fraud.
Outside of digital banking, Sabric said ATM attacks increased by 11% in 2021, and banks lost 17% more money from those incidents than in 2020. Attacks involving explosives increased by 15%. If it's not expensive, criminals use angle grinders to open the ATMs. But those incidents decreased by 11%, from 47 in 2020 to 42 incidents in 2021.
Sabric said it is concerned that this rise happened despite all the technology and security measures deployed to protect ATMs.
There was an 8% decrease in bank robbery incidents overall in 2021, but branch-before-deposit incidents increased by 56%.
If it's not the criminal syndicates targeting banks, ATMs or their customers' digital banking accounts, it's application fraud.
Sabric stats featured application fraud for the first time, looking at home loans, unsecured business and personal loans, vehicle and assets applications, among other things.
Vehicle and asset finance application fraud increased by 53% in 2021. In home loans, 12% of fraudulent mortgage loan applications were successful, while unsecured loans saw a 4.4% decrease from 2020 to 2021.
"We are making inroads in combating banking and financial crime in South Africa. We have trained more than 900 SAPS and NPA personnel on banking products and related evidence. Working closely with the DPCI, we have also established task teams across provinces to aggressively address prioritised banking crime threats," said Mewalall.
