Banks insist that digital fraud is almost always the customer's fault. Court records, withheld audit logs, and the confidentiality agreements that silence victims may tell a more complicated story.

Part 3 of a four-part Daily Maverick series.

Ask any South African who has lost money to digital bank fraud what they think happened, and a version of the same answer comes back with striking regularity: someone at the bank must have been involved.

Miranda Young, whose story we told in the second instalment of this series, wrote to Standard Bank that "whoever did this knew exactly what to do and how to do it".

Similarly, we told of the Cape Town businesswoman whose millions vanished in two days, with payment limits lifted and beneficiaries loaded without her knowledge. Her friend Simon Mantell said this "points to internal system compromise or insider access".

And Robert, whose bedridden wife's dormant Absa account was drained over weeks via a debit order nobody had authorised, told Daily Maverick: "My opinion is that somebody at the bank saw an account with a substantial balance with no movement and decided to fraudulently produce a debit order."

The banks are equally emphatic in the opposite direction.

Standard Bank said its investigations examine "every element of the incident, including how funds were moved, which systems or platforms were accessed, the credentials used, device activity, and any...