South African law today
The scale of the problem, then the law in four settings: when the victim is not the bank’s customer, when the victim is the bank’s own customer, contracting out and consumer protection, and what a victim can do in practice.
The article in brief
“When the money disappears, who should pay? South Africa’s opportunity to rewrite the rules of banking fraud” — published on LinkedIn by Michael Judin and Lionel Moyal. This is its argument in outline; the research brief below carries the cases, the international material and every source.
The scenario is ordinary. An email that appears to come from your conveyancing attorney says the banking details for your property purchase have changed. You pay, your bank confirms the transfer, and only later do you discover that the account belonged to a criminal. Your bank sent the money, another bank received it and a third may have moved it on — yet the person left carrying the loss may be you, still owing the original debt.
The law is candidly more cautious than reformers might wish. A victim who is not the receiving bank’s customer must prove wrongfulness, not just carelessness, and the two electronic-fraud claims of this kind found to have been decided both failed. The courts have also stressed the payer’s own responsibility to guard against a known risk, and a debtor who pays a fraudster’s account can remain liable to the real creditor.
But the door is not closed. A bank that knew identified money did not belong to its customer, or that had specific information and a realistic chance to intervene once credibly warned, stands in a very different position from one that merely processed an ordinary-looking payment. And where a fraudster gave the instruction without the customer’s authority, the bank’s own customer stands on firmer ground.
Other countries have moved. The United Kingdom introduced mandatory reimbursement for authorised push-payment fraud in October 2024; the European Union checks the payee’s name against the account; Australia is bringing banks, telecommunications providers and digital platforms under shared duties. South Africa has its own opening: reported digital banking fraud more than doubled between 2023 and 2025, and the Reserve Bank’s payments roadmap includes defining a liability framework.
The article closes with a proposal, and a question for boards. Technology, including AI-assisted detection of mule accounts and suspicious transaction chains, can make prevention more practicable — and banking boards should expect meaningful information about how fraud is detected, recovered and reimbursed.