by AKANI CHAUKE 
JOHANNESBURG – A HIGH number of South Africans have faced phishing scams when using online banking or mobile wallet services.

According to the Kaspersky Digital Payment survey, 35 percent of respondents faced phishing scams.

It established that 43 percent have personally encountered fake websites and 59 percent experienced scams (via texts or calls) using social engineering.

“Whether we talk about the proliferation of phishing scams or mobile malware, it is important to establish some basic cyber security standards,” said James Gumede, SADC Territory Account Manager at Kaspersky.

South Africa is part of SADC, which is the Southern African Development Community.

“Advanced security solutions, which are able to filter out most of the generic attack vectors, supplemented with other preventive measures such as good cyber security awareness and regular password changes, can help to keep your financial transactions secure,” Gumede said.

To help users in South Africa embrace digital payment technologies securely, Kaspersky experts suggested that they do not share PINs or passwords.

They must avoid using the public Wi-Fi to make any online transactions and should consider using a separate credit or debit card to make online transactions.

– CAJ News