Background

Consumer Watchdog South Africa is a non-statutory not-for-profit entity run by a group of dedicated people who are passionate about consumer rights and consumer protection. Our goals are to stop the exploitation and abuse of consumers, establish best practice guidelines and educate consumers.

Our approach

Our focus is on actions or practices that, whilst they may not be illegal, are unfair, misleading, exploitative or unethical. We pressure consumer abusers to change their behaviour by harnessing consumer power through the use of awareness campaigns, social media, naming and shaming, calls for boycotts, google organic and paid search, etc. Our approach distinguishes us from most other consumer rights organisations, for example the National Consumer Commission which is a statutory body that deals with companies that are in breach of the law, specifically the Consumer Protection Act in that case. In some cases we can and may use the legal system to force severe consumer abusers to change their behaviour.

We also differ from other consumer rights organisations in our proactive approach to identifying consumer abuse. Instead of waiting for consumers to bring complaints to us we have numerous campaigns running and we proactively identify abusers that are in breach of one of our campaigns and we address it with the party concerned. This is not to say that we don't accept nor act on consumer complaints.

Our process

Once a consumer abuse is identified we write to the party concerned giving them one month to explain themselves and/or remedy the abuse and/or commit to remedying the abuse. At this stage they are added to our list of Pending Cases. No action is taken or advocated against the party concerned at this stage. 

Should the party resolve the issue within the month allocated to them or provide a satisfactory explanation to justify their actions then the case is closed and moved to our list of Resolved Cases.

Should the party agree to address the action by a certain date then the case will remain on our list of Pending Cases during this period.

Should the party fail within the month allocated to them to satisfactorily justify their actions or should they fail to take the necessary remedial action then they become an Active Case and we may begin taking action against them, starting with social media communications, naming and shaming, etc. 

In certain cases a consumer complaint can bypass our Pending Claims list and go straight to our Active Claims list without the alleged abuser being given 30 days to respond. This would happen in a case where the person lodging the claim can demonstrate that the alleged consumer abuser has already been given a reasonable opportunity to address the complaint but has failed to do so. In this case the party concerned should still respond to our communication with them as their response will impact what actions we take going forward.

Please Contact Us with any queries.