GASA brings South Africa's scam data together in one place

According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, South Africa lost R59.7 billion to scams over the past year. The figure comes from new research the organisation brought together with a panel of people who deal with scams from different sides: a bank-backed crime centre, a university communication scientist, a fraud-detection company, a consumer regulator and a payments firm.

That is the point of the exercise. SABRIC sees the banking side. The National Consumer Commission sees the complaints. Tazama and PayInc see the transactions. Putting their findings in one room turns scattered numbers into a single national picture, which is what lets a figure like R59.7 billion exist at all.

What the research found

Eighty-five percent of South African adults encountered a scam in the past year, an average of 51 attempts per person. Seventy-one percent of those exposed interacted with one. More than a third of the people who interacted, 35%, ended up losing money or sharing information that led to money being stolen.

Shopping, employment and investment scams drew the most interaction. Among people who lost money, 53% were scammed more than once. Seventy-seven percent said the experience affected their mental wellbeing. The average loss per victim was R7,442.

Recovery is rare

Only 25% of victims who reported a financial loss recovered or were reimbursed for any of it. The research also names the reasons people do not report scams at all: not knowing where to report, processes that are too complex, and stigma.

The panel's answer is not to tell consumers to be more careful. It is to connect the institutions that each hold a piece of the picture. Speakers pointed to behavioural monitoring, suspicious transaction detection and payment controls that can delay or stop a fraudulent transfer before it completes, alongside closer information sharing between banks, telecom operators, technology companies, regulators and law enforcement.

What this changes for a reader is less about any single warning sign and more about where that information now lives. A problem that used to look like a string of unlucky individual incidents is now a documented national pattern, with a cost attached and a named set of institutions responsible for acting on it. That matters because it moves the question from whether scams are serious to what each of those institutions does next.

The research also names the reporting problem directly: people do not know where to report, the process is complicated, and victims feel stigma. Anyone who has been scammed in South Africa and has not reported it is not an edge case. According to this research, they are closer to the majority.