The South African banking industry’s losses due to credit card fraud rose 22% year-on-year in the first nine months of this year, to R366.8m ($36.31m), the South African Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) reported.
Debit card fraud, meanwhile, decreased 42% to R117.7m ($11.6m) as of September 2013, from R204m year-on-year.
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Sabric said about 61% of counterfeit credit card losses affecting South Africans – up almost 36%- occurred outside the country mainly in the US, UK, Italy, Spain and Brazil.
On the other hand, credit card losses inside the country decreased 11.4% between January and September this year, from the same period last year.
According to Sabric, cards fraud and losses from "usual" theft techniques – cards stealing and swapping – also remained alarming despite making up just 8.6% of the total gross fraud losses on credit cards.
Susan Potgieter, GM of Sabric’s commercial crime office, said card skimming was still prevalent in South Africa, making a significant contribution to fraud losses.
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By GlobalDataMost credit card fraud losses (86%) took place in Gauteng, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. The remaining provinces accounted for 14% of the fraud losses for credit cards.
Gobal cyber-security firm, Norton’s 2012 Cybercrime Report, found that South Africa is the third favourite cyber-crime hotspot, after China and Russia.
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