AI now drives 55% of Africa's cybercrime as losses hit $484 million
By Aboki Forex —
Artificial intelligence now drives 55% of reported cybercrime across Africa, making attacks faster, more scalable and harder to detect, according to INTERPOL's African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026. Financial losses from cybercrime on the continent more than doubled from $192 million in 2024 to $484 million in 2025.
The 40-page report, based on survey data from 36 African member countries, describes a defining shift from isolated criminal incidents to an industrialised, borderless ecosystem fuelled by AI tools.
What INTERPOL is saying
Neal Jetton, Director of INTERPOL's Cybercrime unit, said the scale and sophistication of the threat now demands coordinated cross-border responses rather than country-level interventions alone.
"Cybercrime has emerged as one of the most significant criminal threats to the region. The growth of AI-enabled phishing, AI-driven sextortion, deepfake-based deception, and cybercrime-as-a-service reflects a dangerous evolution in both capability and intent," Jetton said.
"However, we see that when countries work together, cybercriminal infrastructure can be identified, disrupted and dismantled," he added, pointing to four high-impact INTERPOL-coordinated operations that collectively resulted in more than 1,500 arrests, the seizure of hundreds of devices and the recovery of over $100 million.
Banks, telecoms and law enforcement slow to share data
The report identifies the absence of real-time, inter-agency data sharing between banks, telecoms operators and law enforcement as a dangerous blind spot that cybercriminals are actively exploiting to facilitate financial fraud at scale.
"While banks and fintechs have improved fraud detection, cross-border collaboration between financial institutions, telecoms, and law enforcement remains slow and bureaucratic," the report said.
"The absence of coordinated computer emergency response team (CERT) responses and limited interagency communication have allowed these threats to operate with minimal interference," it added.
Regional trends and Nigeria
East Africa emerged as a hub of mobile money fraud and infrastructure-targeted ransomware, while business email compromise and romance scams targeting both corporate and individual victims were most prolific in Central and West Africa. Notably, 72% of surveyed countries reported the presence of scam centres, with the highest concentrations in Southern and West Africa.
Digital sextortion and online harassment, often facilitated by AI-generated deepfakes and synthetic media, remained pervasive, with approximately 600,000 sextortion detections recorded by TrendAI, one of several partners working with INTERPOL on the assessment. Business email compromise schemes grew significantly more sophisticated, with AI used to generate highly convincing email correspondence targeting victims in Europe and North America using infrastructure spread across multiple African jurisdictions.
The INTERPOL findings mirror an earlier FBI report cited by Nairametrics, which showed AI-related criminal activity losses exceeding $893 million in 2025. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded 22,364 complaints linked to AI-related cybercrime activities during the year.
In Nigeria, reported digital payment fraud losses fell by more than 50% to N25.85 billion in 2025 from N52.26 billion in 2024, according to The Compliance Reckoning: Regulating Financial Services in the Age of AI report. However, fraud losses have increased by about 350% since 2020, even as reported fraud cases declined by approximately 31%, suggesting that criminals are becoming more targeted and efficient.
For Nigerian businesses and consumers, the trend means AI-powered fraud will keep evolving faster than traditional safeguards. The drop in reported losses may offer some relief, but the underlying rise in fraud efficiency shows why banks, telecoms and regulators must close the data-sharing gaps INTERPOL has flagged.