Cops intensify e-crime fight

By Candice Jones for Telkom
Johannesburg, 10 Dec 2007

The South African Police Service (SAPS) is implementing e-crime workgroups to gain a better understanding of ICT-related crimes and how to combat them.

Superintendent Ronnie Naidoo says the aim of the workgroups, which launch on 11 December in Johannesburg, is to develop strategies for dealing with e-crimes. Participants include all the major banks, as well as Cell C, Vodacom and MTN, he says.

This initiative follows last week`s release of a six-month report on crime statistics in SA, which includes commercial crimes.

According to the statistics, commercial crime incidents, which include ICT crimes, grew 3.1%, from 30 314, in 2006, to 31 261 cases, in 2007. The commercial crime statistics do not reflect ICT-related crimes as a separate category.

Naidoo says SAPS will beef up its dedicated e-crime units, stationed in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, in 2008. This, in part, will be done using information gained through the e-crime workgroups.

The recently-established e-crimes units are manned by officers specifically trained in commercial and online crime, and victims should approach these units to lodge complaints.

"The biggest problem of e-crime is its complexity; that is why we have decided to create a dedicated team."

Naidoo says SAPS plans to collaborate with international police services to track the ICT crime perpetrators who manage to move the stolen money outside of SA`s borders. "Money transferred abroad changes hands rapidly and many times, and by the time we get the report of stolen money, it has already been withdrawn from an international account."

He says the two biggest problems the e-crime unit faces are crimes committed in Internet caf'es, as they are difficulty to trace, and SIM swaps, where the criminal clones a SIM card and accesses the consumer`s private digital information.

Naidoo notes that people often throw away their bank receipts and other valuable paper, allowing criminals access to account information. "People must destroy their receipts."

Encouraging whistleblowers

Meanwhile, fixed-line utility Telkom says it is intensifying its campaign to educate its employees on fraud and corruption, urging them to blow the whistle when they encounter such operations within the company.

Telkom`s campaign follows a Global Economic Crime 2007 survey, which shows the rate of South African businesses falling prey to economic/commercial crime is much higher than the international average.

According to the study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 72% of South African companies reported they had experienced economic crime in the past two years, in comparison with the 43% global average.

"While the number of South African companies that have fallen prey to economic crime in the past two years remains higher than that which is experienced globally, SA experienced a decline in economic crime over the past two years at a rate higher than experienced globally," the report says.

The report shows SA saw an 11% drop in economic crime, with 83% of surveyed companies affected in 2005, compared to 72% last year.

It also shows that in SA most of the economic/commercial crimes (88%) were reported to the board, with 78% reported to law enforcement, 77% reported to the non-executive management, including the audit committee, and 26% reported to the relevant industry regulator.