A teacher who was forced to take an early retirement in April 2023 has been forced to live in a shack after her pension was fraudulently cashed out while she was on a sick bed. 

Dumisile Benedictta Gumede’s pension, worth R615 164, 79 was held by the Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) —a retirement fund that manages pensions and related benefits on behalf of all government employees in South Africa. 

Gumede (58) retired before time while she was a teacher at Lamontville High School in Durban. She  started working there in 2010. Due to this predicament, Gumede now lives a lonely and miserable life in a shack while awaiting justice. 

She only got to know that the money was claimed when she filed her claim in the middle of 2023. That was after she went to the GEPF office in Durban. The office then provided her with all the paper trail of the fraudulent claim. 

According to the paper trail seen by African Times, the money was deposited to an account held by the little-known Albaraka Bank, a Muslim bank with branches only in major cities of the country.

Despite that at the time Gumede had changed her address from Durban to Loskop in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, the fraudster who claimed the money listed an address at 14 Mela Street in Mount Moriah township near Phoenix in the north of Durban.

The fraudster identified themselves as “A Khan” and their branch as Overport City in Durban. The fraudster provided their right thumbprint as required in the National Treasury form used when claiming the pension.

The scammer also listed their cell number, but in other fields, they used Gumede’s ID number and income tax number. The affidavit that accompanied the request to fraudulently cash out the pension was certified as true at Hammarsdale police station in the west of Durban on 17 September 2022. 

After the fraud was uncovered, Gumede took all the information to the SAPS to open a criminal case. To her surprise, a few months later, the apparently dismissive investigating officer from the SAPS allegedly claimed in an SMS that: “Investigation Durban Central: All leads followed up, case closed. Docket will be re-opened upon new leads.”

However, when African Times asked the police in Durban how they could close a case when all the evidence was before them, Constable Thenjiswa Ngcobo said the matter is still under investigation, two years later. 

“Durban Central police are investigating a fraud case following an incident in which an undisclosed amount of money was reportedly paid out to someone else account without knowledge. The investigation is continuing,” Ngcobo said.

The GEPF had not responded at the time of publication.