How sussit works

1. Tenders — connected and live

Tender data currently comes from two official, free, public sources:

• National Treasury eTenders — the Open Contracting Data Standard API National Treasury publishes for the central eTenders portal. Covers tenders from government departments and entities that publish through eTenders.
• City of Cape Town's open data portal — a public, no-login feed of City of Cape Town supply chain tender award decisions. This covers award decisions specifically (who won, and the outcome), not tenders currently open for bidding, so a match here confirms the reference number is real, not that it's still open.

Every day, sussit automatically pulls the latest data from both feeds. When you search a tender reference number, company, or department name, we check it against everything pulled from these sources. If it matches, we tell you which source confirmed it and link back to the original record where possible.

2. Jobs — partially connected, and an honest limitation

sussit now pulls government job postings from DPSA's (Department of Public Service and Administration) weekly Public Service Vacancy Circular, so a real, current government job reference number has a good chance of being confirmed. This is a newer, best-effort source — DPSA only publishes it as a PDF document rather than a proper data feed, so we extract listings from that document automatically and skip anything ambiguous rather than risk showing you a wrong result.

More importantly: research into how South African job scams actually work found that most job scams don't reference a real, checkable number at all — they usually arrive over WhatsApp or social media, often from a free email address, asking for money upfront. A reference-number search genuinely can't catch those, no matter how complete our data gets. For that far more common case, use the red-flag checklist instead — and you can also search a phone number, email address, or bank detail from a suspicious message directly in the box on the home page, which checks it against what other people have reported.

3. What “not found” actually means

If sussit can't find your reference number, that does not mean it's a scam. It most often means one of these:

• The source that would confirm it isn't connected to sussit yet (like jobs, right now).
• The tender or job is real but hasn't made it into that day's data pull.
• The reference number was typed slightly differently than how it's listed officially.

When we can't find something, always verify directly with the issuing organisation using contact details from their own official website — never from the listing or message you're trying to verify.

4. Scam reports

Separately from official sources, sussit also checks your search against a database of scams reported by other users — matching against the reported company/department name, reference number, and any phone number, email, or bank detail included in the report. Every report is reviewed by a moderator before it's marked as confirmed — nothing submitted through the report a scam form goes live automatically.

5. Sources we plan to add

Other provincial and municipal tender portals, and state-owned enterprise procurement listings (Eskom, Transnet, SANRAL, and others) are on the roadmap. Most of these don't offer a public data feed the way eTenders, Cape Town, and DPSA do, so adding them takes more work — this page will be updated honestly as each one actually goes live, not before.