African Police Made 1,605 Cybercrime Arrests in 2025 — But Losses Still Doubled

In August 2025, operators at Uganda's national power grid watched their monitoring screens freeze. Ransomware had gotten into the system that runs the country's electricity. Backup protocols kept the lights on, but the message was clear: cyberattacks in Africa have moved from stealing money to attacking the infrastructure people depend on every day.

That's the picture INTERPOL paints in its African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026, built from data across 36 member countries. Uganda wasn't alone. South Africa's weather service was hit by ransomware that disrupted flight and shipping data. In Nigeria, the Customs Service was hit in August 2025, freezing cargo clearance at major ports and costing an estimated $18 million in storage fees and delays. In Namibia, a telecom provider exposed 500,000 personal and financial records after leaving an admin portal open to the public internet.

The money lost is climbing fast

Reported losses across Africa more than doubled from 2024 to 2025, jumping from $192 million to $484 million, and the number of known victims went from 35,000 to 87,000. INTERPOL believes the real damage is closer to $5 billion for 2025 alone — against $15.3 billion spent on cybersecurity continent-wide. In other words: defenses are growing, but the attacks are growing faster.

What police actually did about it

Law enforcement didn't sit still. Four major operations ran through 2025 and into early 2026:

• Operation Serengeti 2.0 shut down over 1,200 malicious servers and made 120 arrests, disrupting networks tied to $300 million in losses.
• Operation Contender 3.0 targeted romance scams and sextortion across 14 countries, leading to 260 arrests and 1,500 identified victims.
• Operation Sentinel, the largest of the four, spanned 19 nations, made 574 arrests, and decrypted 30 terabytes of ransomware-locked data in Ghana alone.
• Operation Red Card 2.0 went after investment fraud and mobile money scams, resulting in 651 arrests and $4.3 million recovered.

Together, that's over 1,600 arrests in under a year.

Why this matters even if you're not a target

For most people, none of this feels personal until it is. Mobile money fraud was reported by 97% of the countries surveyed. In Kenya alone, SIM swap fraud jumped 327% in 2025, with over 123,000 fraudulent SIM cards issued and $3.8 million drained from mobile wallets. A swapped SIM can empty someone's account before they even notice their phone lost signal.

The bigger problem isn't just the criminals — it's that only four countries require companies to report a breach within 72 hours, and banks, telecoms, and police mostly don't share fraud data with each other in real time. So if money leaves your account on a Friday, the systems meant to protect you might not even talk to each other until Monday. By then, the trail's gone cold.