South Africans who have been scammed, hacked, extorted or harassed online now have a free place to turn for help. The Cyber Helpline, a UK charity, has launched a 12-month pilot in South Africa with local social impact organisation MiDO Academy, funded by Amazon Web Services.
The service covers a wide range of incidents, including investment and employment scams, phishing, hacked accounts, fake social media profiles, sextortion, identity theft and ransomware. It is confidential and open to anyone in South Africa aged 13 and older – but only to individuals and sole traders, not larger businesses.
Victims start with a chatbot on thecyberhelpline.com, which offers immediate step-by-step guidance at any hour. If a case needs more help, it is passed to a human responder.
That is where expectations need managing: there is no phone hotline, responders typically check for new cases twice a day and the service’s official turnaround time is 72 hours, the organisers told TechCentral. Anyone who has just lost money should contact their bank immediately rather than wait.
The helpline can’t recover money or investigate crimes. Its role, according to the partners, is to help victims understand what has happened and work through practical steps – securing accounts and devices, preserving evidence and knowing where to report. Where necessary, it refers people to banks, the South African Police Service, mental health services or other specialist organisations. It does not replace a formal police report.
“Many people simply don’t know where to turn when something happens to them online,” said Rory Innes, founder and CEO of The Cyber Helpline. The charity says more than two million people have used its guidance since 2018 and more than 100 000 have received direct support. South Africa is its third market after the UK and the US.
Student responders
The South African service is staffed by students from MiDO Academy, which trains young people for cybersecurity careers, working under experienced supervisors. Ten responders are active and 16 have completed training. They were vetted and trained by The Cyber Helpline in incident and victim response, including how to support people in distress, and AWS’s trust and safety team ran additional training for the responders in Cape Town.
The idea came from Anna Collard, senior vice-president of content strategy at security awareness training company KnowBe4 and a co-founder of MiDO Academy. “Sophisticated scams are designed to manipulate human psychology,” she said.
Victims often report shame, anxiety and lasting distress alongside any financial loss, and the service’s South African playbooks are designed to deal with the emotional fallout as well as the technical problem.
Case information is encrypted and stored on AWS, handled in line with the Protection of Personal Information Act and shared with other organisations only with the victim’s consent. The partners plan to use aggregated, anonymised case data to track emerging threats.
AWS hasn’t disclosed how much it has put in. Sarah Currey, who works in AWS’s office of the chief information security officer, said the company funded the pilot as an extension of its security work.
Running the service costs about R50 000 per responder a year – covering a small stipend, project management, a workspace at MiDO, voice-over-IP equipment and training – plus an annual licence fee to The Cyber Helpline UK for its website, chatbot, playbooks and training, according to the organisers. Further AWS sponsorship is not guaranteed: the pilot has to prove itself to secure it.
MiDO Academy is running a fundraiser, the Cyber Steps Challenge, on BackaBuddy during October, with participants walking, running, cycling and swimming to raise money. Entry is R100 per person. The campaign’s R50 000 target would, according to the organisers’ own costings, pay for about one responder for a year. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
