Fedhasa warns Ballito holiday scam ‘global problem’
The Federated Hospitality Association of South Africa (Fedhasa) says cybercrime is crippling South Africa’s tourism industry.
It says holidaymakers are increasingly getting scammed and businesses are footing the bill.
A Ballito self-catering property is at the centre of one of the latest scams.
Several people say they have been defrauded of thousands of rands after booking a stay at the unit.
The owners say their email was hacked by fraudsters who diverted payments by changing the banking details.
Newswatch has been inundated with calls from listeners sharing similar stories.
Fedhasa’s Brett Tungay says police are overwhelmed, and some businesses are paying the price for crimes they didn’t commit.
" Most businesses are not IT specialists, especially small and medium-sized businesses. They don't have whole IT departments just to make sure their systems don't get hacked. It's a global thing. It's not just in South Africa that this is happening, and also where the perpetrators are coming from.
"They don't necessarily mean that the crime has been committed in South Africa. On the other side as well, it's just that with the SAPS, there's just not the capacity, and that's where the capacity needs to be built to try and hit back against this kind of crime"
Tungay is urging travellers to double-check details before paying for their holidays.
" People just need to be extremely aware of what they're doing online. They need to read everything twice, make sure that the email addresses they're sending to are the exact email addresses. Because that's what happened with ours. They literally made a new website for us. It's a totally one hundred per cent different website. It'll never take you to the other one."
He's also advised businesses to get cyber insurance.
"Just to try and cover where there's been cyber breaches because there's also people breaking in, not only in tourism, but throughout all industrial sectors, they're getting into businesses, hijacking systems and then asking for ransom to get the systems back on. So this is a huge problem."
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