Warning about reporting card fraud in South Africa

Victims of credit and debit card fraud at South African banks should take care with how they report an incident, as well as their choice of words, as they could find themself in a confusing back-and-forth with the wrong support department.

A MyBroadband reader with First National Bank (FNB) recently fell victim to card-not-present fraud, with several payments going off on his account without authorisation.

Card-no-present fraud most often happens when a perpetrator has stolen a victim’s card or somehow acquired the card’s information.

In this case, the FNB customer said the card was in his possession and had never been used online. He also said he never used the physical card for payments as he only uses an FNB virtual card linked to his phone.

When he saw the first transactions deducted from his account, he immediately cancelled his card reported the fraud through the FNB app. The fraudsters tried to process several more transactions after that, but these failed.

The client then received a follow-up email from FNB regarding the incident, but he soon discovered that his fraud report had been misrouted to the bank’s payment dispute department.

The FNB support agent asked the customer to provide proof of payment and evidence that he had requested a refund from the merchant.

Interestingly, the FNB email address that communicated with the customer suggests that card fraud and debit dispute communications go through the same mailbox.

Attempting to explain that this was fraud and not a chargeback just caused greater confusion.

The fraudulent transactions went off on 14 May 2025, and by 20 May the customer was at his wits-end trying to explain that he was reporting fraud and not a dispute.

MyBroadband contacted FNB about the issue on 23 May, asking how customers could avoid their fraud reports be classified as debit order or chargeback disputes.

FNB responds

The bank provided feedback more than a week later, shortly after it concluded its investigation and refunded the customer.

“FNB confirms that the customer reported fraudulent activity on their account to its fraud reporting team,” said FNB Retail’s head of fraud, Ettienne Fourie.

“Upon being notified of the fraud event, the client’s card was immediately cancelled, and a fraud case was logged.”

Fourie contended that it was incorrect to say the matter was routed to the wrong department. He said the customer had also logged a dispute for the fraudulent transactions with FNB’s dispute team.

“The misunderstanding around the logged dispute has been clarified and resolved with the customer,” said Fourie.

“The case has been thoroughly investigated and based on the findings, the customer has been refunded.”

Fourie said that FNB was committed to protecting customers from fraud.

“We encourage all customers to immediately report any suspicious activity on their bank accounts on the FNB Banking app or through our authorised channels,” said Fourie.

“Customers can also use the FNB App to temporarily suspend or cancel their cards and request new ones to be delivered to them.”