An e-mail scam is using the name of short-term loan company Wonga Finance SA to trick people out of their money, Western Cape police said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Captain Malcolm Pojie said the Hawks in George were investigating the loan scam.<\/p>\n
“An e-mail is sent out to e-mail users informing them that they could qualify for a loan at Wonga Finance SA (Pty), which is a registered credit provider.”<\/p>\n
The scam offered an interest rate of 3.5 percent, so that a personal loan of R60,000 over a five-year term would have monthly repayments of only of R1091,51.<\/p>\n
Once the recipient “applied” for this loan, they would receive e-mails demanding an administration fee, another payment for an attorney fee and a local agent transfer fee.<\/p>\n
“One of the complainants had made a total [payment] of R24,000 without receiving the ‘approved loan’,” Pojie said.<\/p>\n
Three people had come forward to report the scam; one in Oudtshoorn and two in Danabaai.<\/p>\n
Chief executive of Wonga.com SA Kevin Hurwitz said in a statement the company was aware of the scam, which used his company’s logo, registration number, and National Credit Regulator number.<\/p>\n
He said the only way to apply for a real Wonga loan was via the company’s website and it never requested any payment upfront for a loan.<\/p>\n
South Africa was the second-most targeted country for phishing scams according to a study last year.<\/p>\n
Phishing scams involve e-mails purporting to be from reputable companies requesting personal information or money from recipients.<\/p>\n
Hurwitz warned the public to check the legitimacy of any such e-mail with the company it was attributed to.<\/p>\n
“If the offer sounds too good to be true it probably is.”<\/p>\n
An e-mail scam is using the name of short-term loan company Wonga Finance SA to trick people out of their money, Western Cape police said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":27397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5554],"tags":[25,3033,2504,6813],"class_list":["post-55478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-active","tag-hawks","tag-scam","tag-wonga"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55479,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55478\/revisions\/55479"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}