'There was no security breach' — Standard Bank after Comrades winner Gerda Steyn speaks of reporting fraud

When Comrades Marathon winner Gerda Steyn took to social media to speak about the difficulty she had when reporting fraud to Standard Bank on Tuesday, she drew reactions from other people who expressed unhappiness with the bank, suggesting a “security breach”.

“Trying to report fraud to Standard Bank but nobody picking up the phone. I have been on hold for over an hour,” Steyn posted on X.

This was followed by another post saying she experienced further delays in getting assistance from the bank.

Her plight echoed the experiences of numerous other customers who claimed their accounts had been hacked.

Despite these reports, the bank dismissed claims of a breach in its security systems.

“We can confirm there hasn't been a security breach specific to any of our systems or linked to anything we saw in 2021,” Standard Bank chief risk officer Thabani Ndwandwe said in an interview with Newzroom Afrika.

Ndwandwe said it was not unusual for banks to see a spike in suspected fraud cases at month-end.

“Typically, in the normal month-end, we see an increase in productivity as fraudsters try to target clients because they know there's money in the customers' accounts. There's many other fraud modus operandi we see and we block those without even customers knowing.

“This month-end we saw the fraud modus operandi was one that required us to contact customers and many of the clients would have received communication from us because we saw those transactions coming through and our control systems and security systems worked and alerted us,” he said. 

Ndwandwe said the bank's security systems had detected unusual activities which prompted them to contact clients, resulting in a significant increase in call volumes to the bank's call centres.

“This led to an increase in volumes of customers. As a result, our call centre was not able to handle those volumes linked to month-end plus this incident coming through and our call centres struggled.” 

Despite the challenges, the bank's controls were effective in detecting and addressing fraud attempts.

“Every day fraudsters are trying to access clients' money. In many cases clients wouldn't even see the difference. This time it led to a communication to a client because of the change in their modus operandi, but it's not unique. It happens daily.” 

In response to evolving fraud techniques, Ndwandwe said: “We continue to increase our technology and capability, including data analytics to pick those things up and we are always investing, investing millions into it and will continue to do so.

“The controls worked again, except that this time it created client friction, which is our biggest concern.” 

Standard Bank has urged customers to use their mobile app to report incidents.

Ndwandwe emphasised the importance of customers following security advice, such as using strong PINs and avoiding sharing passwords or PINs.

Read some of the other complaints from customers below:

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