It’s a pretty popular scam that’s been running for ages but it just won’t seem to go away, again fleecing many South Africans of their cash without us having a clue that each month we’re paying.

Dubbed the ‘R99 Scam’ this one works by flying under the radar, most users not being alerted to debit orders of such an amount, IOL with more:

Payments Association of SA’s [Pasa] chief executive Walter Volker [said] the R99 scam has been around for a while: “A variety of different scams to abuse the EFT debits (debit order) and non-authenticated early debit order (Naedo) have been around for many years now. The amounts deducted fraudulently are generally relatively small, ranging from R49, R99, R149, and so on.

“The so-called R99 scam is popular primarily because this is below the ‘in-contact’ notification offered by most banks – and is thus utilised by the unscrupulous users with the hope that no notification of such a transaction would be sent to the consumer/ account holder. (The fraudulent debit order or Naedo is then only picked up when a consumer receives his/her statement or checks via internet banking, etc).”

If you think you’re too clued up then consider that between 800 000 and a million inter-bank debit orders are disputed every month, with those being the ones that are actually sniffed out. This rather frightening admission from Volker:

“All EFT debits are sponsored by one of the current sponsoring banks. They pose as legitimate businesses, and it then takes a few months of monitoring before the rogues are detected and then taken out of the system…

There is evidence that these “rogue users” are buying lists from people who have access to the financial data of customers.

“These include trade unions, clubs, gyms, even cellphone companies, insurance companies. These instances, are, however, difficult to prove in court.”

Perhaps best we go over those bank statements in a little more detail each month, all those little withdrawals add up to a pretty penny by the time Christmas rolls around.

[source:iol]