AI now drives most cybercrime in Africa as losses hit $484 million

Artificial intelligence is enabling 55% of reported cybercrimes across Africa, making attacks faster, more scalable and increasingly difficult to detect, according to INTERPOL’s African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026.

The 40-page report notes that financial losses from cybercrime on the continent have more than doubled from $192 million in 2024 to $484 million in 2025.

Drawing on survey data from 36 African member countries, the report describes a defining shift in how cybercrime operates across the continent, with criminal activity evolving from isolated incidents into 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.

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 fintech’s 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.

More insights

The INTERPOL findings on the growing role of artificial intelligence in cybercrime is not unique to Africa.

It mirrors an earlier report by Nairametrics citing findings from the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that AI-enabled cybercrime is becoming a global challenge, with losses linked to AI-related criminal activity exceeding $893 million in 2025.

• The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, published by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), noted that criminals are increasingly using AI tools to create convincing synthetic content, including fake social media profiles, voice recordings and video materials designed to deceive victims.
• The report recorded 22,364 complaints linked to AI-related cybercrime activities during the year, exposing the growing scale and sophistication of AI-assisted attacks.
• The new assessment by INTERPOL shows that AI is making attacks by cybercriminals faster and harder to detect, and that cybercrime legislation is fragmented.
• 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 during the period, with AI used to generate highly convincing email correspondence, targeting victims in Europe and North America using infrastructure spread across multiple African jurisdictions.

What you should know

The impact of evolving cyber threats is also being felt in Nigeria’s digital finance ecosystem, where fraud patterns are becoming more sophisticated despite a decline in reported losses.

• Nigeria’s 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, the decline masks a deeper challenge.

The report found that 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 in their attacks.