Fraud Unpacked: How scammers turn problems into scams

We all have that one oom or uncle who somehow knows how to fix everything. Your geyser bursts, and he arrives in a bakkie with 3 tools, a half‑finished Coke Zero, and a level of confidence that borders on engineering fraud. Half an hour later, the leak is fixed, the tap works again and somehow, he’s also fixed a garage door no one even mentioned.

Every South African family has a version of this. And if you want proof that South Africans are natural problem solvers, you only have to watch ‘the boys’ trying to make a bonfire at 02:00 in the morning.

By all logic, it shouldn’t work. There’s no wood, nobody planned properly and the campsite is mostly damp grass and empty Castle Lite cans. But suddenly there’s a plan. Someone disappears and comes back with wood of questionable origin. Another starts chopping branches with the tiny Swiss Army knife he got for Christmas in 2007. At some point, petrol is siphoned from a bakkie, which somehow becomes part of the solution. 20 minutes later, there’s a roaring fire.

South Africans are wired to solve problems quickly. It’s part of our survival instinct to adapt, improvise and sort things out. Most of the time, that’s a strength – until scammers realise they can use it against us.

In this series, based on Martina Dove’s work on the Fraud Vulnerability Scale, we’re looking at the behaviours that make people more vulnerable to fraud. This one’s straightforward: We like fixing problems quickly.

And when we’re in fixing mode, we stop asking an important question: “Is this even a real problem?” When something goes wrong, we move straight into solution mode, instead of questioning whether the problem is even real.

That’s where things start to go sideways.

You get a message, saying something like “Suspicious transaction detected” or “Your parcel delivery failed.” The details change, but the pattern is familiar. The problem is believable and inconvenient enough to feel urgent. Before you’ve really stopped to think about it, your focus has already shifted to fixing it.

You’re no longer evaluating the message. You’re responding to it.

Scammers rely on that shift. Most scams are built around inconvenience rather than reward – a blocked account, a missed delivery, a tax issue or some kind of security alert. Small problems that people want out of the way.

And then, conveniently, the scammer offers the ‘solution’: “Move your money to secure the account” or “Click here.”  

It feels like you’re being efficient and getting ahead of the problem, but sometimes the fix is the scam.

That mindset carries over into digital spaces.

South Africans are especially vulnerable to this because we live in permanent adaptation mode. We make plans through load shedding, broken robots or card machines that stop working when you’re already standing at the till. You learn to deal with things quickly because you often don’t have the luxury of waiting.

That mindset carries over into digital spaces, and scammers exploit that instinct beautifully. Think about how often we say: “I’ll just sort this quickly” or “I don’t have time for this admin.” That urgency to remove the problem becomes stronger than the instinct to verify the problem.

Legitimate institutions don’t depend on that urgency. Your bank will still be there if you take a moment and call the official number. SAPS won’t disappear because you verified something independently. A delivery company isn’t relying on you clicking a link immediately to keep things moving.

Scammers, on the other hand, rely on momentum. The faster you move from problem to action, the less space there is to notice anything that doesn’t quite add up. And once you do pause, those details tend to stand out – wording that feels slightly off, links that don’t look right or a tone that doesn’t match what you’d expect from a real organisation.

A useful shift is to treat urgency itself as something worth questioning.

So, here’s the rule: The moment something pushes you to fix it immediately, slow down deliberately. Check through official channels. Or ask someone you trust to have a look – your partner or that oom who once fixed a leaking tap using insulation tape and faith. Sometimes that second perspective is enough to change how something feels.

In the next article, we’ll look at vigilance, why scams look so convincing and how tiny details often reveal the truth.

Fraud doesn’t depend on people being careless. It often works because people rush into solving the wrong problem.

Written by Nick Harris, our Head of Financial Crime.