Banks emphasize that digital fraud is almost always the customer's fault. Court records, withheld audit logs, and confidentiality agreements that silence victims may tell a more complex story.
Part 3 of a four-part Daily Maverick series.
Ask any South African who has lost money to digital bank fraud what they think, and a version of the same answer comes back with surprising regularity: Someone at the bank must have been involved.
Miranda Young, whose story we told Second installment of this serieswrote to Standard Bank that “whoever did it knew what to do and how to do it”.
Similarly, we told about the Cape Town businesswoman whose millions of rupees disappeared within two days, after payment limits were lifted and beneficiaries were loaded without her knowledge. His friend Simon Mantel said it “points to internal system compromise or insider access”.
And Robert, whose disabled wife's inactive Absa account was emptied over several weeks through a debit order that no one authorised, told the Daily Maverick: “My opinion is that someone at the bank saw an account with a sufficient balance without much ado and decided to fraudulently prepare a debit order.”
Banks are equally strong in the opposite direction.
Standard Bank said its investigation “examines every element of the incident, including how funds were transferred, which systems or platforms were accessed, credentials used, device activity and any…