The Top 10 Scams in Cape Town,
in plain English

Cape Town’s city centre is a small area, about 1.6 square kilometres of restored old buildings, modern offices, museums, restaurants, and one famous street called Long Street. In a normal summer season around five million people walk through it. For almost all of them, Cape Town is exactly what the postcards promise: beautiful, walkable, and very friendly.

But a small, organised group of criminals sees those five million visitors as a market. The scams they run fall into two clear groups, and it helps to keep them separate in your head.

The first group is in-person scams. These happen face to face on the street, at the airport, or near tourist hot spots. Fake airport drivers, fake “officers” demanding fees, smash-and-grab teams at traffic lights. (“Smash-and-grab” means criminals breaking your car window at a red light to grab a phone or bag.) These scams are visible and they make the news, but they are usually small in money terms compared with the digital category.

The second group is digital scams. These happen on your phone or computer and they don’t care where in the world you are. Fake bank messages, fake tax emails, romance fraud on dating apps, and the very expensive SIM swap attack. The two groups now overlap. A single victim can be hit by both inside 48 hours: a stolen card in the morning, a SIM-swap drain that night using the personal details the criminals already collected.

Long Street and the surrounding City Bowl, the heart of in-person scam activity in central Cape Town.

Scams in South Africa are big business. Three official bodies track most of the losses. They use long names and lots of abbreviations, so here is a quick guide before we look at the chart.

Pulling those numbers together, South Africans lost more than R7 billion in 2024 across the scam categories the industry actively tracks. That is about €360 million, or US$390 million. The real total is almost certainly higher because many scams (romance fraud especially) go unreported out of embarrassment.

What does this tell a visitor? Two things. One: the scams that make the headlines (the airport overcharge, the cloned card) are real but small compared with the ones that move money out of bank accounts overnight. Two: the most damaging scams reach you through your phone, not through a face on the street. If you protect your phone, you have already cut your risk in half.

Inside the official city centre area, the news is genuinely good. To understand it, you only need one more name.

The CCID’s own numbers show that, between January and mid-September of 2024 and the same period in 2025, total reported incidents in the city centre dropped by about 35 percent. Card-fraud incidents specifically dropped from 116 to 51, a 56 percent fall.

The ranking below is built from three things: how often each pattern is reported, how much money it typically takes per case, and how likely a visitor or new resident is to encounter it. Each card has a coloured edge: red for higher risk, amber for moderate, and green for lower risk in central Cape Town. Every entry ends with a “Defence” box describing the standard way to avoid it.

Most scams are not random. They follow predictable patterns of place and time. Here is a quick guide to the patterns that matter.

Time-of-day pattern

Pickpocketing peaks during the day in busy markets and outside major attractions. Smash-and-grab peaks in late afternoon and early evening, when drivers are tired and distracted. Drug-dealer hustling on Long Street and the bar-tab trap peak after 10pm. Online scams have no time pattern at all: they come whenever you are looking at your phone, with a small spike on payday weekends and tax-return season (June and July in South Africa).

Different scams target different people. Knowing where you sit on the map helps you prioritise.

First-time visitors are the prime target for the airport scam, the walking-permit scam, the baby-formula hustle, and the over-priced bar tab. The shared feature is unfamiliarity: someone fresh off the plane has no way to know that walking permits do not exist or that the airport pickup is in Parkade 1.

Older residents, especially those over 50, are the prime target for romance fraud, crypto scams and tax-office phishing. The shared feature here is trust: scammers spend more time on the setup with this group because the eventual payouts can be large.

Anyone with a local mobile number is exposed to SIM-swap fraud, the most expensive scam in the country. Tourists are not the main target, but anyone who buys a local SIM card and links it to mobile banking is in the same risk pool as everyone else.

Local businesses and their staff are targets for impersonation phishing, where an email or WhatsApp message arrives claiming to be from a boss demanding an urgent transfer.

The chart below shows the rough typical loss per case for each scam. Bars are drawn on a logarithmic scale: each step right is roughly ten times the previous one. The chart only shows ranges, because real losses vary widely.

The scams above share more habits in common than they look. A short list of everyday routines covers most of them. The most useful single one sits at the top.

The first hour matters most. Banks can sometimes reverse fraudulent transfers if you call them very quickly. After 24 hours, recovery becomes much harder. The order below works in almost every case.

If money has just left your account. Phone your bank immediately. Every major South African bank (Standard Bank, FNB, ABSA, Nedbank, Capitec, Investec) has a 24-hour fraud line printed on the back of every card. Tell them exactly what happened. Ask them to freeze the account and try to reverse the transaction.

If your phone signal has just died unexpectedly. Treat this as a likely SIM swap. Get to Wi-Fi or borrow a phone, then call your bank straight away and freeze online banking. Then phone your mobile network and demand they reverse the SIM transfer.

If your card was cloned or stolen. Cancel the card through your banking app or fraud line. Order a new one. Most banks deliver to your hotel within 24 hours in Cape Town.

Report the scam. Phone SAPS Crime Stop on 08600 10111 or the national emergency line on 10111. For incidents in the city centre, also call the CCID control room on 082 415 7127. Email phishing attempts to phishing@sars.gov.za if they pretended to be the tax office, or to your bank’s fraud-reporting address otherwise.

If you are a tourist and money cannot be recovered. Get a police case number (you need it for the insurance claim). Most travel-insurance policies cover the value of a single scam up to a stated limit, often a few thousand Euro. Tell your bank back home as well: in some cases the home bank will reverse a fraudulent transaction even when the South African bank cannot.

Cape Town orientation video. For live safety updates inside the city centre, follow @CapeTownCCID on social media and save 082 415 7127 to your phone.