Insult to injury as bank penalises victim of FNB/MTN ‘phishing scam’

On his records for reissuing me with a new card, it was “SIM swop done in error”.

One supposes that this presented an opportunity for MTN to act cautiously and track the activity surrounding the disablement of my phone, possibly to offer a statement of transactions/messages since the phone became inactive.

But assuming there was never a cause for alarm and a service agent had no reason for taking such a precautionary measure, this case clearly presents MTN with a serious issue and identification of weaknesses in their system.

After the hour given as a delay period before my phone could be active, it still wasn’t active. Nor was it active well over 24 hours later. It gave me the message “SIM card not provisioned”.

As it turns out, there must have been a deliberate move to disable my phone so that I would be oblivious to the siphoning of over R120 000 through someone logging into my banking profile and channelling those funds out using EFT.

I cannot imagine the bank employees or system at least not having been part of and an enabler of what proved to be an elaborate fraud scheme.

An investigation into this matter is as much in MTN’s interest as it is to mine and the bank’s, because it would uncover ways of improving safety for their clients. They need to assure clients they have their security at heart.

FNB has subsequently sent the issue to their fraud department. I am yet to receive a written acknowledgement or action plan from FNB assuring me that they are resolving the matter, which I didn’t think would take this long seeing that I reported it within 24 hours of the unlawful transfers, and the fraud division was alerted immediately by the branch.

My request is that FNB separate this fraudulently-incurred debt from my profile while they carry out the investigations. This would give me the opportunity to carry out my normal business, which is now impeded by overdrafts that I hav incurred. Whatever deposits I receive will be swallowed up by the debt and its mammoth interest.

Failure by FNB to isolate this debt and allow me to conduct normal transactions leaves me no option but to divert business away from the bank.

Georgie: Dr David Klatzow, a forensic expert, investigated the matter for a client in Cape Town. He’s reportedly received more than 20 similar complaints, believing a syndicate is operating in cahoots with staff at FNB and MTN.

The bank claims it is a phishing scam, which it cannot be because SIM swops are being done to access accounts. Watch this space. Patrick Linzer writes: Here’s an interesting quirk which you might be unaware of and would perhaps consider investigating and reporting.

This year was a leap year. During leap years, home loans (and presumably also other lines of credit) are charged an additional day’s interest on February 29.

The way it works is that the daily interest amount is calculated as if the year had 365 days, and charged for 366 days.

It may seem like a trifling difference: On a home loan attracting 10 percent interest, the additional day’s interest is R27.40 per R100 000 of outstanding balance.

However, the total home loan debt in South Africa is currently around R1 trillion, which means that February 29 is worth upward of R250 million in essentially free interest to the four or five home loan credit providers.

Not a bad haul of lucre for an extra day’s thumb-twiddling.

In 2012, I challenged our bank on this issue. Their response? After much unproductive and protracted to-and-fro, “It’s in the home loan agreement you signed, stupid!” or some such.

I checked, and sure enough there was a sub-clause (with four sub-sub-clauses) stating that for the purpose of calculating daily interest, a year is deemed to have 365 days, even when that is not in fact the case.

The presence of such a detailed clause indicates the bank is aware of this interest gremlin’s presence and is quite happy to keep it alive and industrious – and never mind that in the second decade of the 21st century, with its ubiquity of computers and programmers, it would be a trivial system fix to adjust the interest calculation algorithm to do things correctly.