The 40-page report draws on survey data from 36 African member countries and highlights what the agency calls a defining shift: cyber-criminality has evolved from isolated incidents into an industrialized, borderless ecosystem. Africa recorded more than 1.1 billion mobile subscribers in 2025, and that rapid digital expansion has outpaced the continent's defenses. INTERPOL noted that cybercrime legislation remains fragmented and that AI readiness inside law enforcement agencies is "alarmingly low." For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI industry coverage.
Losses Have More Than Doubled
The financial toll is climbing sharply. According to the report, cybercrime-related losses in Africa have more than doubled since 2024, rising from USD 192 million to USD 484 million. INTERPOL attributes the surge primarily to AI-facilitated scams, credential harvesting, and automated social-engineering campaigns — categories that simply did not exist at this scale before generative AI lowered the cost of producing convincing fraudulent content.
Online scams remained the most reported type of cybercrime in 2025, the report found, with attackers exploiting mobile money platforms, social media, and AI to reach targets. INTERPOL reported that 72 per cent of surveyed countries recorded the presence of scam centres, concentrated most heavily in Southern and West Africa.
Regional Breakdown of the Threat
The report maps distinct criminal geographies across the continent:
- East Africa emerged as a hub of mobile money fraud and infrastructure-targeted ransomware.
- Central and West Africa saw prolific business email compromise and romance scams targeting both corporate and individual victims.
- Southern Africa's ultra-high connectivity made it a magnet for global threat actors seeking maximum disruption.
This regional mosaic reflects how local conditions — payment infrastructure, connectivity, and policing capacity — shape where particular criminal business models take root.
Deepfakes and AI-Generated Deception
Some of the report's most striking findings concern AI-generated synthetic media. Digital sextortion and online harassment, frequently facilitated by AI-generated deepfakes and synthetic media, remained pervasive. TrendAI, one of several partners working with INTERPOL, recorded roughly 600,000 sextortion detections.
Business email compromise (BEC) schemes also grew dramatically more sophisticated. INTERPOL reported that AI is now used to generate highly convincing email correspondence, with Africa-based threat actors targeting victims in Europe and North America while routing their activity through infrastructure spread across multiple jurisdictions. The result is attacks that are harder to attribute, harder to trace, and far more convincing to the employees and executives they target.
A Global Warning Sign
While the report focuses on Africa, its implications are global. The same dynamics INTERPOL describes — AI making scams scalable, deepfakes eroding trust in digital evidence, and automated social engineering overwhelming underprepared law enforcement — are playing out on every continent. The doubling of losses in a single year offers a concrete preview of what unchecked AI-enabled crime can cost as generative tools continue to proliferate.
INTERPOL's assessment is ultimately a call to close the gap between the speed of AI-driven crime and the capacity of the institutions meant to stop it. With AI now implicated in the majority of reported cybercrime in an entire region, the agency's message is that defensive AI readiness can no longer be an afterthought.
Sources
- INTERPOL, African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026 (August 3, 2026, Lyon, France)
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