Cape Town-based online trading group Banxso appears to benefit from several deepfake scams linked to prominent business icons such as Elon Musk and Johann Rupert.
They were then contacted by Banxso, following which they ‘invested’ nominal amounts of R4 700 and R5 000 and commenced trading with the help of ‘success managers’.When the losses started to mount, the success managers would urge them to invest additional funds to “recoup their losses”. These subsequent investments were usually significantly more than the initial deposit, but these amounts were soon wiped out too.
The author used the verification function of his Absa online banking service, which confirmed that the account belonged to Banxso, proving that it wasn’t a spoof site.As mentioned earlier, a Banxso agent was quick to call after the registration of one of Moneyweb’s registrants, ‘Johan’, on the Immediate Matrix site.
He said Banxso is not a “get-rich-quick scheme” but that clients could expect potential returns of between 15% and 20% a week on a “low-risk” investment option and 30% to 40% a week on a “high-risk” option. “I’ve seen the ad, and I know exactly what you’re talking about. But like I said, we are not linked to him.”
“We’ve searched up on the Immediate Matrix. So, if you Google Immediate Matrix, you’ll see there are a lot of scamming things. Scam and scam reviews and all of these crazy little things. So that’s basically relating to the trading system. The fully automated trading system. So that’s like a marketing ad that you’ve seen. Marketing Immediate Matrix, automated trading, robots and things like that.
The first interaction was an email in which he acknowledged that Immediate Matrix registrations flow through to the Banxso platform but claimed they were unaware of it. He also stated that it was not suspicious that Camroodien proactively referred to the R4 700 or R4 800 investment, as this is the rand value of $250, which is “observed by approximately 95% of the online investment sector”.In a subsequent virtual meeting, De Andrade said Banxso initiated an investigation into Immediate Matrix “to understand technically how they’ve come to be perceived to be linked to Banxso”.