Cybercrime is changing scale across the African continent, and artificial intelligence is now the main force behind it. According to the African Cyberthreat Assessment 2026, published this Monday, August 3, by INTERPOL, 55 percent of reported cybercrimes in Africa now involve AI tools, a sharp jump from just two years ago.
This 40 page report, the fourth edition of INTERPOL’s African cyberthreat assessment, draws on responses from 36 member countries across the continent. Its findings are blunt, cybercrime has evolved from isolated incidents into a fully industrialized, borderless criminal ecosystem, powered by artificial intelligence. AI tools now automate the search for victims, produce fraudulent emails nearly indistinguishable from genuine messages, generate manipulated content, and fuel large scale scam campaigns.
Financial losses tied to cybercrime on the continent have more than doubled in a year, rising from $192 million to $484 million. Business email compromise fraud, made more convincing through AI written emails, has mostly targeted victims outside Africa.
The report also flags a troubling rise in digital sextortion. INTERPOL’s partner TrendAI detected nearly 600,000 cases involving AI generated content. Côte d’Ivoire is among the hardest hit countries, ranking third on the continent for IP addresses linked to sextortion campaigns, with more than 64,000 detections. In Mali, roughly 3,500 sextortion cases were recorded, alongside more than 4,000 distributed denial of service attacks in the first half of 2025 alone.
Another example cited in the report is the 2025 hack of Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics website, an attack that disrupted the release of official economic data and helped fuel disinformation campaigns. More recently, on July 18, 2026, hackers breached Kenyan President William Ruto’s official website, defacing its homepage with hostile messages and a ransom demand of five bitcoins.
A previous INTERPOL survey, conducted in 2025, had already flagged a worrying technology gap among African law enforcement agencies, with a large majority admitting they had yet to integrate AI tools into their investigative work. The new report sees that gap as increasingly dangerous, given how fast criminal networks are automating, driven by a digital transformation that’s outpacing the response capacity of authorities, with more than 1.1 billion mobile subscriptions recorded across the continent in 2025.
On the operational side, several coordinated INTERPOL crackdowns, Operations Serengeti 2.0, Contender 3.0, Sentinel and Red Card 2.0, have led to more than 1,500 arrests and the recovery of over $100 million in recent months. Neal Jetton, director of INTERPOL’s Cybercrime Directorate, welcomed those results while warning that cybercrime in 2026 is more sophisticated and destructive than ever, with organized networks continuing to inflict severe financial and psychological harm on individuals, businesses and entire communities.
To counter the threat, INTERPOL is calling for harmonized digital forensic capabilities across countries, stronger cross border cooperation, investment in training law enforcement on AI related technologies, and lasting partnerships between the public and private sectors to improve prevention, detection and response to cyber threats across the continent