How to get paid safely when selling to South Africa

A South African buyer who asks for samples, negotiates terms and signs a purchase order is a normal customer. The risk that catches exporters off guard is different: someone who never intends to buy at all, but pretends to be a government office or a tender committee to get your goods, or a fee, for nothing. This guide covers two schemes documented in South Africa, what payment terms are normal, and how to check a change of bank details before you act on it.

What payment terms are normal when selling to South Africa?

Treat a South African buyer the way you would treat any new customer in a market you don't know yet: ask for a deposit before you start production, keep the balance due against shipping documents rather than after the goods have already landed, and put both terms in a signed purchase order rather than in an email thread or a chat message. None of this is specific to South Africa — it is the baseline to hold everywhere until a buyer has a track record with you.

What is the "Government Order Scam" the National Treasury warns about?

South Africa's National Treasury has repeatedly warned about a scheme it tracks as the "Government Order Scam": someone sends an urgent request for quotation on what looks like an official government letterhead, tells the supplier they have "won" the order, and then has the goods delivered to an address that is not a real government office, or to an intermediary posing as an official. No payment ever arrives. The warning has been reissued in the Government Gazette in successive years, most recently in Gazette No. 2025/294 (South African Government Gazette No. 2025/294).

The signs the Treasury itself lists: the contact details don't match the real department, there's no trace of the delivery address online, the invoice is addressed to a private person instead of an organisation, there's no order number, and the phone number is a landline-style number that doesn't match the department.

Two checks follow from that list, and the second matters more than the first. Check that the tender and the department exist: if you can't find them in South Africa's official eTenders portal, treat the order as unverified, not as "probably fine." Then check the channel, not just the name — a real department's email domain, switchboard number and delivery address come from its own gov.za site, not from the message in front of you. A scheme that borrows a real department's name but gives you its own phone number and bank account passes an existence check and fails a channel check.

What is the "tender approval fee" scheme?

In October 2025, the Office of the Premier of the Eastern Cape warned businesses about a related scheme: someone calling themselves a procurement officer phones a supplier and asks for a payment to "approve" or "release" a tender, in amounts the office put at R50,000 to R1 million (The Herald).

This is the clearest warning sign on the list: real government procurement in South Africa does not charge a fee to approve, release or "process" a tender you have already won. A request for one is the signal itself, whatever title the caller uses.

B2B.Africa never asks you to pay a buyer, a tender committee or an agent.

How do I check a change of bank details mid-deal?

A quieter version of the same problem shows up after you already have a real deal: an email arrives mid-transaction, from a domain that looks almost right or from a hacked mailbox you already trust, saying the buyer's bank account has changed. Between June and August 2025, Operation Serengeti 2.0 — coordinated by INTERPOL across 18 African countries, South Africa among them, and the United Kingdom — dismantled cybercrime and fraud networks, led to 1,209 arrests and recovered $97.4 million, with business email compromise named among the targeted crime types (INTERPOL).

Never change a payment detail on the strength of an email alone. Call the buyer on a phone number you already had before the message arrived — not one written in the message — and confirm the change by voice before you send a single payment to the new account.

What should I do before I ship or change a payment detail?

Confirm the tender, the department and the channel before you rely on any of them — our step-by-step guide to checking a South African company covers the registry side. Keep every term of the deal — price, deposit, delivery address, bank account — in a signed document, not a phone call. Messages on B2B.Africa keeps that record in one place, so a "new account" or a "tender fee" request sits next to the deal it claims to belong to instead of arriving quietly in a side channel. For ready-to-use documents, see Templates for a safe B2B deal in Africa.

This is general information, not legal advice.