Africa-Press – South-Africa. When your bank account is emptied overnight, the assumption is simple: you must have done something wrong.
Clicked the wrong link. Shared the wrong code. Made a mistake. But what if that’s not the full story?
A new investigation by the Daily Maverick’s Rebecca Davis is raising doubts about whether that explanation paints the full picture.
Commercial crime link bank fraud is on the rise, she says.
“It’s not just increasing, it’s increasing exponentially year on year.”
And the main reason behind the spike? The advent of AI.
“There are LLMs available on the dark web which take away all the normal protections of the AIs we tend to use every day, which allow you to plan and execute a scam from beginning to end.”
Davis’ investigation challenges the idea that bank fraud is always down to user error.
Her reporting draws on court records and real life cases. She says there’s a gulf between the belief many customers have that this kind of fraud is always an ‘inside job’, and the story given by the bank.
“The bank’s position is, by default, the opposite. They say this never happens, it’s impossible. Bank employees don’t have the necessary access to accounts.”
The reality, said Davis, is that neither position is correct.
“We filtered through scores and scores of accounts people sent us about the frauds that happened on their account and in a lot of cases, unfortunately, even though they didn’t realise it, they had compromised the security of their accounts.”
The scale of the problem is catastrophic, say Davis, explaining that every day banking customers are having tens of thousands of rand, sometimes millions of rand, transferred out of their accounts.
“Whether they’re responsible or not, the point is, the money is gone from their accounts and they’re not getting it back.”
Davis added that if a bank is able to identify that a customer’s security details, such as log in and password, were used to facilitate the fraud, there’s very little that can be done in the way of redress.
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