By working with the South African banking sector, the Department of Special Operations (DSO) - commonly known as the Scorpions - says it has managed to prevent R100 million in cybercrime from taking place.
Paul Louw, deputy director for public prosecution in the DSO, says because his task-team is operational 24/7, "it has managed to achieve huge success in combating the tremendously complex crime".
He says that through an operation called "Project Cool Frog" the DSO recently searched 80 premises, made 10 arrests, secured seven convictions, and saved banks R100 million by tipping them off before-hand about e-crime activities.
Louw explains, "The syndicates targeted by Project Cool Frog used various methods such as phishing, spyware and key loggers to steal the private and unique Internet login credentials of individual customers. The stolen information was in one instance stored on a server hosted abroad in Russia."
The Scorpions used cutting-edge detective methods, including technology such as mobile triangulation, to determine the location of criminals and infiltrated those networks, leading to the convictions achieved, he says.
Louw and his team have been awarded an International Association of Prosecutors (IAP) award for their work, as well as an International Law Enforcement Cybercrime merit award.
Standard Bank regularly works with the Scorpions to prevent cybercrime from taking place. That banks` director of group security, Pat Pather, says the DSO`s efforts in fighting cybercrime have been "extraordinary".
"Huge cyber criminal syndicates have been broken through the strategic relationship established between the Scorpions and the banking sector," he says. "Most noteworthy though, is that this relationship has facilitated the infiltration of cyber criminal syndicates leading to successful convictions; in absolute contrast to similar cases abroad, which go undetected, and are never investigated."
Not a simple task
According to Louw cybercrime is particularly hard to fight in SA, as the crime is anonymous and hard to track and servers are often located outside the SA jurisdictions.
Also, "South Africa experiences an influx of illegal aliens from various countries, including Africa and Eastern Europe," he says.
Louw explains that stolen funds are usually transferred to numerous beneficiary accounts - known in the banking industry as "e-mules" - with the account-holders of these host accounts often being recruited in impoverished communities in South Africa, or from the ranks of illegal aliens, in exchange for fraudulent South African identification documents.
"It is consequently extremely difficult to identify, trace, arrest and successfully prosecute these perpetrators," he says.
Integration issues
In contrast to the Scorpions, the South African Police Service (SAPS) has been silent on the topic of e-crime.
This week SAPS released the latest annual crime statistics, including those for commercial crimes (under which cybercrimes are categorised), but have been unable to provide ITWeb with a break-down of what proportion of these crimes are computer-related.
Commercial crimes in general have, however, shown yet another increase in the last year, this time of 11.7%, compared to 5.8% in the previous year.
Six months ago the SAPS launched a dedicated e-crime workgroup to work with the banks and major cellular companies to combat e-crime, but feedback on this initiative has not yet been forthcoming.
The ruling ANC has been pushing for the Scorpions to be placed under the jurisdiction of the SAPS and while there is no certainty in this regard yet, Louw says the proposed merger will not negatively impact on law enforcement`s ability to combat e-crime.
He says DSO`s proactive approach to this complex field has worked thus far and, "if law enforcement in SA follows this approach, we should be able to successfully combat cyber crime."
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