Several Pretoria residents have lost thousands of rands in a “bank call” scam trend targeting unsuspecting individuals with bank debit orders, in the past weeks.

“The scammers call people and say they are bank personnel from the bank’s fraud department. They will inform you of a debit order that was incorrectly deducted from the account,” said police spokesperson Sergeant Yeroboam Mbatsane.

Mbatsane said the scammer would then send aone-time password (OTP) via SMS and ask the unsuspecting individual to give it to them for the transaction to be stopped.

“It is then when the scammers take the money,” he said.

Mbatsane said this week about five cases of this trend were reported at the Boschkop police station in the east of Pretoria.

“We started to see an increase of cases reported during May,” he said.

He said in one of the cases a victim lost R3 000 that was supposed to be for a debit order.

“The scammers sometimes call two to three days before the debit order transaction under the pretence that a person did not pay their order.

“Most people only notice that they were scammed when the real debit order takes the money,” he said.

People who lost large sums of money included those who had done online shopping transactions, he said.

“The police will investigate how the perpetrators get hold of the victim’s confidential information because only an employer and a bank would have it. At this point it is unclear where they obtain the confidential information from,” Mbatsane said.

“We would like to warn the public to refrain from entertaining bank issues via phone calls. Whenever they experience challenges with their banks, they should rather visit the bank offices because it’s very difficult to establish the reliability of the genuine bank call from that of fraudsters.

“With the high rise of crime, criminals employ every trick available.”

Mbatsane urged the public to report fraudulent activities such as this scam to their local police station.

“The public can also call 10111,” he said.