- Dozens of online retailers have disappeared after taking payment, leaving consumers defrauded and without recourse.
- The National Consumer Commission has now flagged 95 untraceable suppliers in an escalating online fraud crisis.
- Consumers are warned to double-check online sellers’ legitimacy and report scams to help prevent further losses.
The National Consumer Commission (NCC) has raised the alarm after uncovering 38 additional suppliers who accepted payments from consumers but failed to deliver goods, services, or supplied defective products, in clear violation of the Consumer Protection Act.
The suppliers were operating across Gauteng, North West, the Western Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal, but have since become untraceable.
According to the NCC, complaints received from affected consumers paint a troubling picture of businesses that have simply vanished. In many cases, suppliers are no longer operating from their listed physical addresses or have shut down their websites entirely. The NCC says consumers are unable to reach these businesses, and its own attempts to trace them have been unsuccessful.
The NCC said the situation has left consumers “with no means to seek redress,” highlighting the emotional and financial distress suffered by people who paid in good faith and received nothing in return.
Online impersonation and deliberate evasion
Preliminary assessments by the NCC indicate that some online suppliers are impersonating legitimate businesses with the intention to defraud unsuspecting consumers. Other suppliers, the NCC said, deliberately fail to provide contact details or physical addresses, making it impossible for consumers to return defective or incorrect orders.
The NCC described this behaviour as “a deliberate ploy by unscrupulous suppliers to rob consumers of their hard-earned money and ultimately evade accountability.” It warned that e-commerce has increasingly become “an easy money-making platform for scammers,” particularly where consumers do not verify the legitimacy of online sellers before making payment.
The NCC emphasised that this conduct strikes at the heart of consumer trust and undermines the protections guaranteed under South African law.
How consumers can protect themselves
In response to the growing threat, the NCC has urged consumers to exercise extreme caution when transacting online. It has advised consumers to use the services of the South African Fraud Prevention Services to verify whether online suppliers are legitimate before making purchases.
Consumers are also encouraged to report any suspicious or fraudulent online suppliers. The NCC said such reporting assists authorities in identifying emerging scams more quickly and prevents further harm.
To date, the NCC has flagged a total of 95 untraceable suppliers, a figure that continues to grow as more complaints are lodged.
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In 2022, a similar type of scam website (calling themselves “Roadside Hardware”) conned a number of people during the load shedding crisis by “selling” generators at a fraction of the price when compared to other retail outlets. Victims who attempted to purchase a generator via the scam website were instructed to pay into a TymeBank account (with prices exceeding R 6000), then would receive no goods at all. The scam website went offline shortly after people started giving it negative publicity online. Of greater interest, the name of the website was a knock-off of an actual company that was liquidated decades prior. Online scams have been (and unfortunately continue to be) elaborate deceptive tactics deployed by fraudsters. With Artificial Intelligence in the mix, it is becoming more difficult to discern fraudulent from authentic stores online as criminals now use AI tools to make their sites more convincing to the general public.