Kaya 959 Reporter
The current economic climate has seen many South Africans finding themselves with a mountain of debt that has resulted in them being blacklisted and failing to manage their debts.
The National Credit Regulator (NCR) has over the year done public awareness efforts warning consumers about the debt solution scammers on social media.
Scammers are proposing “debt solutions” all over social media, preying on people’s weaknesses at this time.
There are numerous advertisements on Facebook promising unsuspecting South Africans that they’ll cut their debt repayments.
Advocate (Adv.) Kedilatile Legodi, the Manager of the NCR Debt Counselling Department says that “in recent times, there has been a surge in advertising for “debt review removals” and some consumers are charged in the excess of R8000 to have his/her debt review flag removed”.
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Kaya Biz with Gugulethu Mfuphi spoke to Lebogang Musupye, a Supervisor at the NCR Debt Counselling Department who gave helpful tips to consumers on how to spot these scammers.
Listen to the full conversation here:
Musupye says many South Africans are finding themselves in a very tight spot financially, which makes them susceptible to scammers.
“I was just looking at the numbers the other day and over 1,6 million consumers that are over-indebted or under debt review, and you can see the trend with the reserve bank that we are now going on an upward trend when it comes to interest rates and things are getting tougher,” says Musupye.
She also gave examples of instances when consumers find themselves desperate and end up clicking on debt review/counselling links on social media and warned consumers should to be wary of advertisements that do not include the debt counsellor’s NCR registration number.
Adv. Legodi warns that “if it is too good to be true, it probably is, don’t be fooled or scammed by such unlawful and false advertising,”
