Standard Bank employee arrested for stealing over R1 million in card clone scam

The Hawks’ Serious Commercial Crime Investigation unit has arrested a 47-year-old Standard Bank employee for allegedly defrauding a bank client of over a million rand.

In a statement, the Hawks said that the consultant – who is employed by Standard Bank in Musina – allegedly invaded a client’s bank account in early January and fraudulently transferred sums of money into different fictitious accounts.

Her fellow syndicate members would then allegedly make withdrawals from these fictitious accounts.

The Hawks said that its investigation has uncovered that the consultant allegedly authorised replicated bank cards with a valid pin code on the victim’s account to enable the looting to appear as if it was the client’s transactions.

It added that the suspect is likely to face charges of fraud‚ money laundering and contraventions of Electronic Communications and Transactions Act.

It has also announced the possibility of further arrests.

Fraud

According to the South African Banking Risk Information Centre’s (Sabric’s) latest card fraud statistics, debit and credit card accounted for R342.2 million and R436.7 million being stolen in 2017 respectively.

One of the biggest contributors is counterfeit card fraud which led to R83.6 million being stolen in 2017, the group said.

Counterfeit card fraud is perpetrated with a card that has been illegally manufactured using information stolen from the magnetic strip of a genuinely issued card.

“In some instances, lost, stolen and old cards are re-encoded with information stolen from a genuine card for purposes of committing counterfeit card fraud,” Sabric said.

“The information needed for counterfeit card fraud is usually stolen through card skimming.”

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