Upswing in digital banking crimes

WHILE the number of incidents in digital banking crime increased by 64% this year, there has only been a 7% increase in the value of losses over last year’s R250 million.

Yesterday, the South African Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) released its inaugural digital banking crime statistics.

They show that, compared to last year’s 13438 incidents across banking apps, online banking and mobile banking, the number of incidents from January to August increased.

“Comparing January to August 2017 to the same period in 2018, mobile banking incidents showed an increase of more than 100%, with gross losses of R23593631, while online banking incidents showed an increase of 44% with gross losses of R89368722.

“For the same period, banking app incidents increased by 20%, with gross losses of R70156364,” said Sabric.

SIM swop incidents doubled from 4040 to 8254 incidents from January to August 2018, an increase of 104%.

Sabric chief executive Kalyani Pillay said: “Criminals are always looking for ways to exploit digital platforms to defraud victims, but the mitigation strategies deployed by banks are very robust, so it is easier to target people, as they are the weakest link.”

Pillay added that criminals were “very skilled” in using social engineering to manipulate their victims into divulging personal or confidential information. She said criminals capitalised on the fact that not all digital banking clients were digitally literate and exploited this vulnerability.