Capitec blocks 131,000 suspect accounts ahead of Black Friday scams
The bank's financial crime chief says impersonation scams spike in the shopping season, and it has already stopped R699 million leaving client accounts.
Capitec blocked more than 131,000 suspicious beneficiary accounts in the year to June 2026, including 64,000 mule accounts, and warned clients against more than 394,000 scam payments, as the bank’s financial crime head predicts a rise in fake retail websites over Black Friday.
Nick Harris, who heads financial crime at Capitec, told 702 that criminals will likely mimic well-known brands such as Takealot, Game and Incredible by building fraudulent websites in the run-up to the shopping season. The warning was reported by MyBroadband on 16 September.
“Particularly in the run-up now to Black Friday and the shopping season, we see a lot of impersonation scams,” Harris said. “People click on these advertisements and go directly to a fraudulent website. There, they either take your banking card details or other financial details.”
Three methods, ranked by how often they are used
Capitec has identified three main online shopping scams operating in South Africa. The most common is the marketplace scam, where a seller on a platform such as Facebook Marketplace asks for an upfront deposit and then disappears.
The second is the fake online store, where criminals use artificial intelligence to build a website that looks like a real retailer, complete with product pages, marketing material and customer testimonials.
The third is impersonation, where a known brand’s name, logo and web address are copied closely enough that a shopper clicking an advertisement lands on the wrong site.
Jean Rossouw, who heads consumer financial education at Capitec, said shoppers can spot most of these before they pay. The clearest red flag is a price that does not make sense, either a product at a fraction of its normal price or a popular item at an extraordinary discount.
“Another warning sign is pressure messages like ‘today only’, ‘limited stock’, or ‘buy now before it sells out’,” Rossouw said.
She added that shoppers should be wary of online stores that accept only real-time transfers, electronic funds transfers or money send transactions, because those payment methods leave little room to reverse a payment once it is made.
“Advertisements, websites, and social media pages that appear professional don’t necessarily mean that a business is legitimate,” Rossouw said. “With the help of AI and other digital tools, scammers can today create websites, marketing material, and even customer testimonials to appear very credible.”
What the bank says it has already stopped
Capitec says its fraud prevention work protected clients from losing more than R699 million between July 2025 and June 2026, across a client base of about 26 million people.
Before an electronic funds transfer leaves a Capitec account, the beneficiary is scored in real time. Where other clients have previously reported a beneficiary, the bank folds that history into a risk rating that the paying client sees on screen, along with the option to cancel without a time limit.
An intelligent payment screening system the bank introduced over the period shielded 113,410 customers from fraud.
The bank has also launched Secret Safe, a feature that hides selected accounts inside the Capitec app so they cannot be seen on a phone. A hidden account can only be unlocked in a branch. Since its launch a month ago, 75,000 accounts have been secured this way.
Its app also carries a malware detection tool that scans a client’s device for software loaded to intercept banking credentials, and the bank is developing a feature called Trusted Approver, which lets a client nominate someone they trust to approve payments before money leaves the account. That approver is notified through the Capitec app and has 12 hours to approve or decline, and can pause the client’s app and freeze cards if something looks wrong.
What this means for shoppers this season
The practical effect for anyone buying online in the coming weeks is that the bank, not the retailer, is the last checkpoint before money moves. A beneficiary that carries a warning rating, a store that will only take an instant transfer, and a discount that is out of step with every other price are the three signals a shopper can act on before paying.
The scale of the numbers Capitec has published also points to how much of this activity is domestic and routine rather than exotic. Mule accounts, which are bank accounts used to move the proceeds of a scam, made up roughly half of the 131,000 accounts the bank blocked.
South Africa’s banks have been building this kind of screening for several years, and the figures Capitec released are its own account of what its systems caught. Shoppers who bank elsewhere will not necessarily see the same beneficiary warnings, because the scoring described here runs inside Capitec’s own app.
Black Friday falls in late November. Capitec’s advice to its clients is to check the seller before paying, treat urgency as a warning rather than a reason to hurry, and use payment methods that can be reversed.
Source: MyBroadband, Capitec warns of fake Takealot and Game websites on Black Friday.
