African law enforcement agencies and cybercriminals are almost equally exposed to AI. But they are not adopting it at the same speed, according to Interpol’s African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026.
AI was involved in 55% of cybercrime cases observed by African countries surveyed by Interpol in 2025, as criminals used the technology to produce convincing phishing messages, fabricate identities, and impersonate executives and public figures. Deepfake incidents increased sevenfold between the second and fourth quarters of 2024.
The police pursuing them are adopting the same technology much more slowly. Only 8% of intelligence analysts surveyed had advanced AI expertise, while 92% of agencies cited a lack of technical expertise as their main obstacle to using AI. Most still relied on manual processes.
“Criminals are now operating at machine speed,” Interpol said. Law enforcement, by contrast, remains constrained by “legal processes, bureaucratic delays, and a lack of technical capacity”.
Making sophistication cheaper
The imbalance is opening a new front in the AI boom. The technology is making common forms of fraud, such as phishing and SIM-swaps, cheaper and easier to scale faster than the institutions responsible for stopping them can adapt.
Phishing, identity theft, and financial fraud predate AI. What has changed is the amount of work and expertise required to carry them out convincingly and at scale.
Interpol said generative AI tools that were once the preserve of researchers and developers have become accessible and are being “weaponised by criminal actors with minimal technical expertise”.
AI is now being used across the attack cycle, from getting potential victims and generating phishing messages to extortion and evading detection.
The implications are significant for a continent where rapid digitisation has brought hundreds of millions of people into financial systems built around mobile phones.
The continent had more than 1.1 billion mobile subscriptions and processed more than $1.1 trillion in digital transactions in 2025, according to data cited by Interpol. About 570 million people use the internet, increasingly accessing banking, healthcare, education, and government services online.
More digital activity also means more useful data when systems are breached. African-origin material appearing on dark-web forums increased 62% year on year, including identity documents, banking credentials, SIM PINs, and mobile-money account details.
AI can turn that information into more convincing fraud.
Interpol said AI-generated audio and video, deepfakes, have been used to impersonate government officials, corporate executives, and relatives. In Uganda, a deepfake of a prominent public figure was used to promote a fraudulent investment scheme that caused more than $2 million in losses.
Fraud is also becoming more industrialised. About 72% of African countries surveyed reported the presence of scam centres, particularly in southern and western Africa.
“These are not random actors; they are organized criminal enterprises,” Interpol said.
The networks have supply chains for recruitment, technology, laundering, and evasion, and are increasingly using AI to generate personalised lures, cloned voices, and fake testimonials.
Police are moving at a slower speed
The continent’s cybersecurity weakness is partly technological, but Interpol’s findings also show that it is institutional.
The difficulty for African governments is not simply that criminals have better technology, but that they can adopt it without having to acquire much new infrastructure. Most law enforcement agencies cannot.
According to the report, 94% of agencies surveyed said they lacked sufficient digital forensics tools. Only 22% of digital forensics units had a working knowledge of AI-driven threats, while many cybercrime units operated with fewer than 10 people.
Then there is bureaucracy. Nearly three-quarters of respondents reported slow information exchange between agencies, while 89% identified cross-border co-operation as the biggest barrier to successful investigations.
Even when banks detect suspicious transactions, Interpol said they may lack the authority or technical channels to immediately block an associated SIM swap or freeze an account. Obtaining court orders can take weeks or months.
Telecom companies face similar constraints when police request SIM-swap records. Fintech and mobile-money operators have yet to integrate real-time fraud alerts with national law enforcement systems, leaving IP logs, transaction trails, and account information scattered across institutions.
Cybercrime investigations depend on a chain of institutions — the police, prosecutors, courts, banks, telecom operators, technology companies, and, increasingly, their counterparts in other countries.
Criminals do not have to navigate any of this.
Cybercrime-as-a-service
The most capable AI models are already available as consumer products or through APIs, while cybercrime-as-a-service markets provide specialised tools to people who lack the expertise to build them. Interpol said this has “democratised access to advanced attack tools”, allowing relatively low-skilled criminals to carry out more sophisticated attacks.
For law enforcement, adopting the same technology is more complicated. An agency has to procure tools, train investigators, and ensure that evidence collected using them can be used in court. Investigations involving banks or telecom companies have to comply with rules governing access to private information.
Once a suspect, victim, server, or bank account sits in another country, another legal system enters the picture.
But the irony is that cybercriminals face few of these structural obstacles that dominate Africa’s AI debate. They do not need sovereign data laws, national AI policies, or large pools of talent.
They need access to an open-source model, stolen information, and a place to wire funds siphoned from victims.
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