Your author has just returned from a vacation to Cape Town, South Africa. While there, it was difficult to avoid the prospect of crime and fraud and so it seems reasonable now to discuss identity theft in South Africa on this site.

 

It appears as though fraud and corruption are evident at virtually every level of South African society - including government. One needs simply to open the pages of any daily newspaper (on any day?) to read stories of corruption in the 'business' world.

 

In fact, things are so bad, that there is a weekly magazine called Noseweek that is dedicated to investigating and publishing stories about corruption in the country. Not many nations can claim to have - or need - such a dedicated publication!

 

Several different people warned me - independently of each other - to do my best to avoid using a cash machine / ATM whilst in the country. It seems that scams designed to grab card details are very common. As evidenced by this story from January 2009.

 

In fact, in many parts of downtown Cape Town and all of the more touristy locations visited, guards spend their days protecting ATM users from crime. By the end of the trip, it was still not clear to me whether they were there because crime is so bad, they are a genuine deterrent or simply to provide work. There is a lot of life below the surface in South Africa!

 

Either way, this rather ad hoc experience suggests that financial crime in South Africa - including identity theft - is not uncommon.

 

In fact, there is an organisation to help individuals protect themselves from identity theft. SAFPS exists to help residents in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa to find the information they need to protect themselves.

 

In fact, as this news article from June 2008 suggests, identity theft in South Africa could be costing individuals and firms more than 1 billion Rand each year. While the Rand may not be the strongest currency in the world, it is still a very substantial amount of money.

 

It appears that the lack of integrated databases in South Africa (almost certainly a good thing!) means that the crimes usually start with the theft of one or more identity document. From there, more information can be gathered and crimes committed. This is certainly a less subtle - and possibly less sophisticated - form of the crime than can be found in the US and UK.

 

A grim twist on this requirement for identity documents is described in this article where it seems that people are being declared dead (!!!) so that fraudsters can cash in their life assurance policies. Yikes. This is certainly creative, but very morbid.