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Paris-based anti-fraud company Evina has determined that one in three mobile subscription attempts in South Africa is fraudulent.
The company said South African cell phone users often subscribe to mobile services without their consent, the company says.
“After Kenya, South Africa is the African country most affected by fraud that steals millions daily from the mobile accounts of cell phone users,” said David Lotfi, Evina’s CEO.
“As the most advanced economy in Africa, it is particularly tragic that South African mobile users are victims of subscription fraud that is well managed in many other countries.”
The various mobile payment agents do not treat fraud seriously enough and this can be seen from the fact that 31% of mobile subscription requests in South Africa in July were fraudulent.
Lofti said this is very concerning, adding that the solution is not to block value-added mobile subscriptions by default, but to manage the problem with better tools and expertise.
Evina has determined that South Africans are most at risk from a very basic fraudulent mobile activity: click hijacking.
“Clickjacking is a type of mobile-based fraud that is more than five years old and could be blocked very quickly if local market players took this threat seriously,” says Lotfi.
South African mobile device users are also the target of a wide range of nefarious apps commonly available for download from the app store, including flashlight, wallpaper, pedometer, file manager, and video creation apps.
WASP fraud in South Africa
Over the past few weeks, MyBroadband has published reports from numerous industry players about the widespread theft of airtime in South Africa.
Most of this airtime theft occurs when Dishonest WASPs fraudulently subscribe to South Africans to content subscription services without your knowledge or consent.
Through these fraudulent subscriptions, they steal millions of airtime from mobile subscribers every day.
The exact scale of this fraud has never been officially reported, but conservative estimates from industry players suggest it runs into the billions of rand.
What is especially concerning is that criminals are using the gateways provided by mobile operators to commit this crime.
Mobile operators such as Vodacom, MTN, and Cell C make it possible for WASPs to bill mobile users directly through operator billing. Basically, they receive the keys to the subscribers’ accounts.
Mobile operators can block WASP billing by default, but despite a decade of fraud and billions of stolen airtime, they refuse to implement this solution.
The problem is even deeper. In some of the cases in which airtime was stolen, the mobile operators themselves acted as WASP.
That means that airtime was stolen from Vodacom and MTN subscribers through fraudulent subscriptions to content services offered by Vodacom and MTN.
Now Read: How To Steal Billions And Get Away With It
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