Free cybercrime and online scams helpline goes live in South Africa
“South Africans who have been scammed, hacked, extorted or harassed online now have a free place to turn for help. The Cyber Helpline, a UK charity, has launched a 12-month pilot in South Africa with local social impact organisation MiDO Academy, funded by Amazon Web Services. The service covers a wide range of incidents, including investment and employment scams, phishing, hacked accounts, fake social media profiles, sextortion, identity theft and ransomware. It is confidential and open to anyone in South Africa aged 13 and older – but only to individuals and sole traders, not larger businesses. Victims start with a chatbot on thecyberhelpline.com, which offers immediate step-by-step guidance at any hour. If a case needs more help, it is passed to a human responder.”
To be clear, this is an advice line to help explain what happened to a victim, and what they should do. So it will include relevant referrals, and won't be doing any recoveries. Victims should probably not delay though reporting anything to their banks and the police.
This could still be very useful for individuals and small business, as they often have no idea who to turn to, or what resources are available, and what exactly must be preserved as evidence.
The other big plus is, this may also give far greater visibility to what sort of scams are actually happening, as many firstly don't make it through to the police, and secondly the police drop it into buckets like “fraud general”. We can now possibly get a clearer picture of what platforms the scams take place on, who is targeted, what the cumulative amounts involved are, etc. This not only starts pointing back to patterns around the perpetrators, but could pressurise the relevant computer platforms to take more severe action and preventative measures themselves.
Police statistics just don't go into this sort of granular detail. They do also state “The partners plan to use aggregated, anonymised case data to track emerging threats”.
This is not a government funded service, and is an AWS funded initiative for a period of a year. Hence, they are also running a Cyber Steps Challenge on BackaBuddy, as a fundraiser to try make this a more sustainable service.
See
Free cybercrime helpline goes live in South Africa
A free, confidential cybercrime helpline backed by AWS and The Cyber Helpline has launched in South Africa. Here’s how it works – and its limits.
#technology #southafrica #cybercrime #scams
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