Fraudsters

Yesterday I received notification on my cell phone of a deposit into my ABSA account of R82 000. I could not work out who would have deposited it, only a reference J002. At midday yesterday I received a call from John Ndlovu from "South African Receiver of Revenue" stating that they had erroneously deposited a VAT Return of R82 000 into my bank account, Reference J002 and that they needed me to reverse this payment as it should have done to TLB Towers. They faxed through to me a very official looking letter with all the information and their banking details at ABSA. Last night I went into my banking to do the transfer but decided to print a bank statement first. I saw that the R82 000 was in my account but still "uncleared". Gut feelings were quite strong, so I did not reverse the amount but waited till this morning to phone my bank. They could not identify who the deposit came from. I then asked to be transferred to the risk/fraud division and explained everything to them. The ABSA investigators phoned me a short while ago to let me know that this was a scam, the bank account that I was to transfer into was a personal account with no funds in presently. They also expect that the cheque deposited into my account will be a stolen cheque and will bounce and they would reverse it in a few days. This means that would have "paid back" the money into someone’s private account, they would have withdrawn the money, and then the cheque would have bounced, leaving me with R82 000 less in my account.

Please can you pass this onto everyone that you know. I have been advised that this is happening with people saying that they are from "SARS", "PEP Stores", TELKOM, Water and Electricity Municipal Departments etc . Do not pay anything into any account and contact your bank immediately.