For many in South Africa, the promise arrived in a familiar, convincing form. A video of Elon Musk, or sometimes local billionaire Johann Rupert, appeared online endorsing a revolutionary new investment platform. The message was that advanced artificial intelligence could generate massive returns, turning a small deposit into life-changing wealth.
This was the gateway for hundreds of people to Banxso, an online trading platform that marketed itself as a democratising force in finance. Today, that gateway has slammed shut, sealed by a record ZAR 2 B USD 118 M fine and a trail of devastation linking cutting-edge deepfake fraud to old-fashioned financial misconduct.
The Financial Sector Conduct Authority's FSCAs recently declared penalty against Banxso is the largest in South African regulatory history. It caps a catastrophic fall for a firm that, just a few years after its 2021 launch, had secured sponsorships with the national soccer team Bafana Bafana and UFC champion Dricus du Plessis to burnish its legitimacy.
