The bulk of my funds are kept in an account which sits on its own separate profile on which no online banking and or mobile banking is allowed. I have to physically go to the bank in person in order to have funds moved from that account to my everyday account.
That is an option I have never considered, for two reasons:
1. I like being able to see all of my bank accounts in one list and how much credit/debt is associated with each account
2. I will never fall victim to a phishing scam, although it is still possible that my login details could be obtained using a keylogger or other malware, or a DNS poisoning phishing site scenario, or even more unlikely is a man-in-the-middle interception of my hashed login details sent to the bank over SSL.
It's a nice option, keeping one's funds "offline", just not an option that I currently feel I need to implement.
As far as ABSA's fraud victims are concerned, my interpretation and reading between the lines of the numerous news articles, is that there are a significant number of victims, where the bulk of the stolen money was taken from their mortgage accounts, and smaller amounts of money stolen from other accounts, linked to the same Internet Banking portfolio of accounts.
Who goes to a cellphone shop to take out a cellphone contract, and supplies bank statements for their mortgage account? No one does that, and it means that the syndicates are getting information about the liquidity of ABSA customers, directly from ABSA employees. I believe that makes ABSA liable for the fraud, at the very least ABSA should pay back 50% of what was fraudulently stolen from ABSA customers that fell victim to targeted phishing scams.
