ABSA offers a rather ingenious service called CashSend. Basically you are able to transfer cash to anyone using an ABSA ATM, without the recipient requiring so much as a bank account. They need only punch in a reference number, which you provide them with, and voila they have the cash.

Die Burger reported, in January this year, cases of holiday makers, having found suitable holiday venues on Gumtree classifieds, sending advertisers deposits via CashSend, only to never hear from them again. Since there is no bank account to trace the transaction to, it’s very difficult to find the culprit.

Even a few months out of a job will make you more receptive to financial hoodwinks than you normally would be. Con artists exploit this by offering “work-from-home” jobs in which you need only receive or transfer a few payments from your personal bank account or PayPal account for a decent wage. What you actually end up doing is laundering money and defrauding others.

The other favourite job seeker pull is fake employment offers or job websites.  Operating under this pretext, criminals are able to garner personal or financial information from unsuspecting victims. And then it’s just a matter of time until they get your money.

International sporting spectacles like the 2010 World Cup are often used to sucker people into providing conmen with financial information. FIFA warned fans about these scams on the SA2010 website earlier this year urging, “people not to provide any personal or financial details if requested to do so”.

Unsolicited email that informs you that you have won a 2010 FIFA World Cup lottery is a scam. You will likely be asked to fill in personal information on some site or another – their lifeblood.

According to a Symantec report, released this year, South Africa is the 50th worst-affected country by cyber crime. This position is likely to worsen as more South Africans gain access to the Internet and events like the 2010 World Cup rev-up.

The best advice we can give is to simply never give your bank details to anyone online. You can also visit the following sites for more info: www.slamtheonlinescam.com, www.scambusters.org.