With South Africans travelling far and wide during the upcoming long weekends, queues at the various toll gates on our journeys are assured as much as potholes will be on secondary roads.

Traditional payment methods on toll roads have been inconvenient for motorists and vulnerable to abuse and fraud. With little effort fraudsters were able to abuse the system in various ways and as a result losses to fraud have been escalating year on year.

Hotspot

The South African Banking Risk Information Centre has identified toll gates as one of the main hotspots for card cloning.

The most common method is skimming, where a skimmer is used to copy the magnetic stripe data.

Shimming uses a very thin device placed inside a chip reader to read and steal data from EMV chip cards.

Tap-to-pay

With FNB’s new online toll solution fraud volumes related to credit and debit cards have declined by over 90% since it launched in November last year and addresses the weaknesses of traditional systems by processing payments made with EMV chip cards.

The bank has installed tap-to-pay portals on 161 toll gates across the N3 and N4 routes.

At tollgates where the FNB solution has been installed, there has been a near total migration from swipes to contactless transactions for contact-enabled cards.

“By replacing outdated, fraud-prone systems with secure, real-time payment processing, we’ve not only enhanced convenience for motorists but also achieved a dramatic reduction in card-related fraud.

"This is a win for all stakeholders in the toll payment ecosystem,” said Netsai Ngidi, Product and Solutions Head, at FNB.

The bank said they were continuing to roll out the system countrywide aiming to have the majority of toll concessionaires migrate to the new solution before the end of the year.

That’s good news, but to eliminate the risk, we would advise using cash or installing an e-tag, which allows you to use the e-tag only Shesha lane making waiting time in queues much shorter and often almost immediate.

tolls

Going away for the long weekend? Using the new toll payment solution reduces fraud by over 90%