It’s almost 2017, but we all still carry our ID books around. South Africans are ‘stuck’ with their green passports’, says Vinny Lingham. While he now lives in Palo Alto in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s kept his South African passport, and he’s often here, vising family, filming M-Net’s Shark Tank, or taking care of a little business. He says 20 years ago, you could still travel on your South African passport without a visa - it would at least have got you to London. But this has all changed, what with the ‘fraud at Home Affairs, and how easy it is to buy a passport’.

Over 13 million people in the United States were affected by identity theft last year, with losses running to an estimated $5 billion. Meanwhile, the South African Fraud Prevention Service has about 100 000 incidents of fraud on its database, which it says equates to about R1 billion that it has saved for its partners, like banks and insurance companies.