Let me bomb your heart: Terror groups target South Africans in romance scams

Terror groups are blackmailing South Africans on romance sites and fraudsters are impersonating senior business executives to defraud companies of large payments.

The South African Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) released its annual report earlier this week, and it made for sobering reading.

“Bank customers continue to be affected by the onslaught of phishing, vishing and Smishing attacks,” it said.

“These relentless attacks leveraged data, social media and technology, making it even more difficult to spot fraudsters’ efforts to convince customers to give away their PINs, account numbers, OTPs and ID numbers.”

The effectiveness of these attacks resulted in a 42% increase in all digital banking crimes occurring on banking apps.

The year also saw an increase in gross fraud losses for South African-issued credit and debit cards.

Business e-mail compromise remains a priority threat as fraudsters become more sophisticated, Sabric said.

“The traditional modus operandi to hack or spoof personal and business e-mail accounts with a request to send large payments has changed.

“Recent cases have seen fraudsters increasingly exploit virtual meeting platforms to hack or spoof business leaders’ credentials to commit this crime.

“Criminals compromise a senior employee’s e-mail, such as that of a financial director, which is used to invite employees to participate in a virtual meeting.

“To create authenticity, fraudsters insert a static image of the supposed financial director, claiming  the video function is faulty.

“Some fraudsters will go to greater lengths and use deep-fake audio to issue the payment instruction to the employee, as opposed to using the executive’s compromised e-mail.”

An obviously poor grasp of the English language used to be a helpful “tell” that an e-mail was the work of a fraudster, but many have upped their game on that front, Sabric said.

“A good command of English has become very important to these criminals as they want to ensure the messages they send to their victims do not raise any red flags due to obvious grammatical errors.”

Romance scams have evolved into something far more dark.

“A terrorist group member will use a fake identity to connect with a potential victim on a dating site. After first contact, the member quickly talks the victim into using an external e-mail or chat service outside the dating site.

“Once the victim’s trust has been gained, photos are passed back and forth until the member obtains sufficiently compromising photos of their victim.

“The victim is then contacted by either the same or a different member of the terrorist group and is told if they do not agree to pay a ransom, the images will be placed on social media or made available to friends, family or an employer.

“A bank account number is provided, the victim pays, and the money is withdrawn.

“Victims of these scams are naturally reluctant to admit someone they have fallen for has betrayed their confidence.

“While it is concerning that romance scams have affected many victims in South Africa, of even greater concern is the involvement of terrorist groups to generate illicit sources of income to fund their terror activities.”

• GET IN TOUCH: You can contact Wendy Knowler for advice with your consumer issues via e-mail: consumer@knowler.co.za or on Twitter: @wendyknowler.

Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. Just R20 for the first month.