Fraud victims win watershed ruling
One phone number. Two years. Thousands of calls. Multiple victims. One bank. And a confidentiality clause attached to every settlement. That line, drawn from a detailed case study submitted to IoL by a SA fraud investigator, could stand as an epitaph for the country’s banking fraud crisis – a crisis that is, by every measure, accelerating.
The National Financial Ombud Scheme (NFO) recorded almost twice as many fraud-related complaints in 2025 as the year before, closing 3 651 cases and recovering R442.9m for consumers.
Yet in 85% of banking fraud disputes, rulings still favour the banks, reports the Sunday Tribune. Now, a court ruling from halfway across the world is threatening to rewrite the script.
On 3 June, a court in Antwerp, Belgium, handed down a ruling that banking law specialists are already describing as groundbreaking.
The case centred on an elderly couple who were defrauded of just under €50 000 ( about R1m) after being manipulated by a fraudster posing as a bank employee and persuaded to transfer the funds to an account in Portugal.
Banks in Belgium, as in SA, routinely refuse to reimburse such victims, arguing they committed gross negligence by transferring the money themselves.
The Antwerp court rejected that logic and, in doing so, may have established a precedent with significant global resonance, reports the Sunday Tribune.
Banking law specialist Geert Lenssens, commenting on the ruling to Cybernews, explained the principle affirmed by the judge.
‘The bank is obliged to reimburse a customer who is a victim of phishing, unless the bank proves that the customer has committed a gross error,’ he said.
'A gross error is the big exception,' he said.
'If, for example, you enter or hand over your code as a result of a scam, that is not a gross error.'
Until now, the standard practice had been the reverse: banks assumed customer negligence and customers were required to disprove it. The Antwerp court reversed that burden entirely.
Lenssens estimates true gross negligence – the legal threshold for denying reimbursement – applies in barely 1% of phishing cases.
The lawyer predicted that the ruling would be used ‘thousands of times in legal practice in the coming months and years’ and described it as a wake-up call for the banking sector.
Article disclaimer: While we have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of this article, it is not intended to provide final legal advice as facts and situations will differ from case to case, and therefore specific legal advice should be sought with a lawyer.
