Robberies of people shortly before or after they have visited banks or ATMs had fallen, the SA Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) said on Tuesday.

KwaZulu-Natal was the only exception, where the number of attacks grew by 90 percent from January to August this year. The amount stolen has more than doubled compared to the same period last year.

In Gauteng, such robberies had shown a drastic drop in the period concerned -- from 602 attacks last year to 373 this year.

Police and Sabric held a number of news briefings across the country to reveal these trends.

Sabric said there were 717 such robberies countrywide between January and August, compared to 793 in the same period last year.

Senior operations manager Ronnie Zonke said in Durban the banking industry was worried over customers being targeted when depositing or withdrawing large sums of money.

In the 373 attacks in Gauteng, more than R10 million was stolen from bank customers -- down from R19.96 million taken in the first eight months of 2011.

In KwaZulu-Natal in the first eight months of 2012, there were 129 attacks, in which R5.14 million was taken.

In the same period in 2011 there were only 68 attacks and R2.2 million was taken.

Zonke said 72 percent of the attacks in the province happened after cash had been withdrawn and 23 percent had taken place shortly before a cash deposit was due to be made.

The riskiest time to be heading to the bank in KwaZulu-Natal was between 9am and 10am.

Fridays and Tuesdays were the high-risk days in the province.

National police commissioner Riah Phiyega said in Midrand that more needed to be done to combat crime.

"It is getting [more] sophisticated day-by-day, and therefore we cannot use only old approaches to deal with new, emerging crimes."

Phiyega lauded the collaboration between police and the banking sector and said it was important for the role-players to work with police.

She said it was important to raise awareness on banking crimes and to educate people to prevent crime from happening.

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