Sizwe Mtuze, a professor of cyberlaw at Nelson Mandela University, says South African authorities need to spend far more on training law enforcement officials to handle electronic crime.

Speaking to Newzroom Afrika, he said officers need to understand how digital evidence is created and where an electronic crime actually takes place, so that more banking scam cases reach court and get prosecuted successfully.

The sharpest point Mtuze makes is not the training gap; it is the contradiction inside the standard advice. Criminals ask for the same personal information banks ask for when they verify a customer, and he admits he gets calls from his own banker requesting personal details. So telling people never to share information does not work when the legitimate process looks identical to the fraudulent one.

He calls the whole situation a Catch-22: banks must be held responsible for keeping their technology secure, while consumers still have to stay alert. His practical advice is to hang up on any unexpected call claiming to be from your bank and dial back on a number you already hold.

Absa's fraud risk executive Caryn Gilmour pointed to the bank's In-App calling feature, which lets a customer confirm inside the app whether they are speaking to an authorised representative. FNB's Giuseppe Virgillito recommended setting daily transaction limits and turning on instant notifications.

MyBroadband carried Mtuze's remarks along with responses from Absa and FNB on the in-app protections customers should be using. Newzroom Afrika aired the full interview, in which Mtuze argued South Africans are too trusting of what happens in the digital space. MyBroadband separately reported that internet banking fraud victims lose an average of R73,582 per case, considerably more than victims of banking app takeovers.

Look at where the fraud moved and why. Institutions hardened their systems after 2019 and banking crime fell 19% by 2024, then digital fraud rose again in 2025, this time aimed at customers directly. That shift matters here because, as we covered with Verifyd last month, South African victims carry the loss themselves.

In the UK, banks reimburse up to £85,000. So when the answer to a scam epidemic is consumer vigilance, that is liability sitting with the person least equipped to detect it. The interesting part is that the real fix is already visible in the source. Absa's In-App calling moves verification inside a channel the customer already trusts, which is the same problem SA fraud-detection startups like Verifyd and Orca Fraud are working on from the outside.

Whoever solves caller and message verification properly has a product every bank here eventually needs.

You might also like our piece on the SA banking trojan reading one-time PINs off Android phones, the Lego South Africa data breach that handed criminals a phishing list, and why AI financial crime in SA keeps outrunning compliance.

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