Mayeni Jones

It was coordinated by Interpol, which is the international policing organization.

And it involves 19 African countries that range from kind of South Africa, which is the continent's most industrial countries, to less developed countries like South Sudan, the DRC, Republic of the Congo.

And basically, they focus on three main areas.

So one of them is what they call business email compromise, when somebody kind of impersonates a senior person at a company and tries to get employees at that company to wire money or share sensitive information.

They also looked at digital extortion and ransomware, which is when some software is deployed to an organization's computer system, locking them out, and then you have to pay the criminals money in order to get access to your system again.

And the reason why they focused on those three areas is because these were identified by Interpol as being the kind of biggest growing threats across the continent.

Yeah, they say that it's a really big growing problem in Africa, that it accounts for what they estimate to be 30% of all reported crimes in East and West Africa.

And so it's something that they're taking very seriously.

And also by its very nature, cybercrime, you know, it doesn't just affect people on the continent.

It could affect people all over the world.

So in their rationale, they kind of say we need to kind of coordinate agencies, policing agencies across the continent and beyond if we're going to try and stop these crimes from being carried out.

So, yeah, it's a really wide range of countries.

So, for example, they've given a few examples of some of the issues that they tackled.

There was one that was a kind of a cyber fraud network that was operating between Ghana and Nigeria.

And apparently they managed to defraud more than 200 victims.

And

you know, steal over 400,000 US dollars.

And basically what they would do is they would mimic well-known fast food brands.

They would collect payments from users thinking that they're ordering their fast food, but then the orders would never come.

And so 10 suspects were arrested for that in that case in Ghana.