MBB: Capitec sounds alarm — Temu and Shein SMS scams target SA shoppers

Key topics.Fake Buffalo SMSes demand R19 “delivery” paymentFraudsters harvest card details via spoofed sitesFICA freeze scams mimic banks to steal logins.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Myles Illidge.Head of financial crime at Capitec, Nick Harris, says fraudsters are aware of the popularity of Temu and Shein in South Africa and imitate their logistics partners in SMSes to scam victims.Speaking to Cape Talk, Harris said these scam text messages often claim that there’s an outstanding payment on orders that must be paid before they can be delivered.He said this is commonly seen with SMSes imitating Buffalo Logistics, the primary logistics partner for Temu and Shein in South Africa.“If you’re like me, there’s every second day some other unmarked parcel arriving from Buffalo Couriers, another Temu or Shein parcel that my wife’s ordered,” Harris said.“They [fraudsters] have hooked onto this, that a lot of consumers would be getting SMSes from particularly Buffalo Logistics.”He said communications from fraudsters imitating Buffalo Logistics request payment of an outstanding amount of around R19.“Your parcel’s ready for delivery, you just need to make payment,” such a message could read.According to Harris, these fake SMSes are common and aim to harvest credit card details. He warned that victims will start seeing card-not-present fraud taking place on their accounts.“They take you to the payment page, and there they’re basically just harvesting your credit card details,” he said.Harris warned that fake Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA) and account suspension SMSes are also common in South Africa.“Your account’s about to be frozen. It’s non-FICA compliant. And again, the SMSes have these links in there,” he said.He warned that clicking on links in such communications could take victims to fake Internet banking websites that can intercept their PINs and passwords.In July 2025, Standard Bank warned that customers should be wary of FICA-related phishing scams claiming that bank accounts will be blocked.“Your Standard Bank account is scheduled to be blocked in 2hrs due to fica failure update. Please update your profile to avoid this https://url.sg/[REDACTED],” one such scam sent to a MyBroadband reader said.Red flags to watch out for.MyBroadband shared the above SMS with Standard Bank, which confirmed that it was not an official communication from the bank.There were several red flags associated with the scam message. The first being that the text message contained various grammatical errors that likely wouldn’t appear in legitimate communications.Secondly, the person who received the SMS had their Standard Bank notification settings set to email-only. Therefore, all official communications would go to their registered email address.Lastly, clicking on the link in the message takes users to a webpage resembling a Standard Bank portal, where they are asked to enter their credit or debit card details.While the spoofed webpage may appear convincing, banks won’t ask customers to provide credit or debit card details to access these portals.They are likely designed to harvest card details, after which criminals can make card-not-present payments with them.“Spoofed websites usually have similar logos to the original sites and, in some cases, they may even be identical,” Standard Bank warns in an article on its security centre.“The domain name or web address is also similar to that of the original website and will often use words associated with the company’s name or products.”However, it should be noted that this wasn’t the case for the above FICA-related SMS scam. In this case, the domain did not resemble a Standard Bank domain — another red flag to watch out for..This article was first published on MyBroadband and was republished with permission

MBB: Capitec sounds alarm — Temu and Shein SMS scams target SA shoppers

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