South African fraud surge runs on trust, not hacking

Digital banking fraud in South Africa surged 86% in 2024, reaching 97,975 incidents with losses of R1.89-billion, even as overall financial crime losses fell 18%. The dominant attack vector is not technical hacking but social engineering — criminals exploiting human trust, urgency, and emotion. AI is amplifying these attacks by enabling convincing deepfake voices, personalised phishing, and scaled scam content in local languages. Security experts recommend 'digital mindfulness' for users and architectural defences that assume humans will be fooled, using centralised log correlation and behavioural context analysis to detect chained attack patterns that siloed tools miss.