Name: Hundreds arrested in Africa-wide cybercrime crackdown | Global News Podcast
Uploaded: 2025-12-23T17:04:03.000Z
Duration: 7 min 18 s
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Welcome to the Global News Podcast on YouTube, where we go behind the headlines to find out more about a story and why it matters.

Cybercrime, in which criminals target individuals or companies online with the aim of defrauding or disrupting them, is a growing problem across Africa.

Often it's done by sending malicious links and emails or text messages.

Now, a huge police operation codenamed Operation Sentinel across several African countries has led to nearly 600 arrests and the recovery of millions of dollars.

We're joined by our correspondent in Johannesburg, Miani Jones.

So, Miami, how serious is cybercrime across Africa, and what have countries been doing to tackle it?

Well, according to Interpol, cybercrime is becoming a real big problem in Africa.

According to them, around 30% of all recorded crimes in east and West Africa are cy cybercrimes.

And so in order to tackle it, they launched this Operation Sentinel.

It involves 19 countries that came together and collaborated to try and crack down on some of these cybercriminals.

These countries range from here in South Africa, which is the continent's most industrialized nation, to less developed countries like Benin Republic, like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

So every single region from east to west, southern and Central Africa, sub Saharan Africa, I should say, were all covered.

Okay, so can you tell us more about the particular crimes involved in this operation?

Who was arrested, and what have they been accused of?

So this particular operation, Operation Sentinel, focused on three main areas of kind of digital crime.

One of them is so fraud carried out by people impersonating, say, a senior person at a company pretending to be them via email, and

using that to get employees from that company to wire money to a certain account or to reveal some sensitive business information.

They also focused on digital extortion and on ransomware.

So that's when you deploy software to a company's Internet or computer system, and

that keeps the members of the company out of that system.

And if they want to get back access, they have to pay the criminals money.

So they focused on those three areas, because they say those are the three areas, according to their research, where there's been the biggest kind of rise in number of incidents reported.

Okay, so we're seeing a lot of police resources being devoted to tackling cybercrime.

I wonder if we're also seeing more education in terms of educating the public not to click on malicious links, for example.

Yeah, I mean, this particular operation focused more on kind of beefing up police capacity.

And that's because Interpol says That cybercrime, even if it originates in Africa or affects African customers, it can happen to anybody, anywhere in the world.

And by its very nature, it's very international.

So they said they needed international collaboration between these 19 African countries, but

also agencies in Europe and private members of the private sector to try and find solutions to this.

So this operation has primarily focused on building up the capacity of crime agencies, policing agencies across the African continent to try and deal with this problem.

Because with technological developments happening all the time, it's not a problem that's going to go away anytime soon.

So, Mayen, in which countries in Africa is this really a problem?

Is cybercrime really affecting either the people who live there or are cybercrime gangs thought to be located?

Yeah, so this is a problem that seems to be affecting most African countries.

That's because Internet penetration is increasing right across the continent.

But the most affected countries are those that have what they describe as strong digital penetration, where lots of people have phones, lots of people have access to the Internet.

So, for example, in its research, Interpol released a report earlier this year looking specifically at cybercrime in Africa.

They found that Egypt and South Africa were two of the countries that were most affected by ransomware attacks.

So those are these attacks where software is deployed, it freezes, locks people out of their computer system, and

then they have to pay money to get access to that.

So obviously, both of these countries are quite industrialized, have a lot of big companies working there, and

that provides those criminals with lots of access to potential victims.

But it's truly a problem that they found everywhere.

An example of one of the issues that they tackled in this operation was a collaboration between groups in Nigeria and Ghana, where they targeted fast food.

They mimicked the website of popular fast food restaurants.

People would go to those websites, place their order, thinking they're going to get their fast food in however long, half an hour, et cetera.

But then the food order would never come.

And it turned out that the criminals were pocketing that money and not delivering the food.

So a group of criminals from Ghana, in this instance, were detained.

So it's a problem that we're seeing right across the board.

It's affecting government agencies, it's infecting, affecting private individuals, and it's in fact affecting big companies as well.

So we've got, as we say, a growing problem across a number of countries in Africa.

So what more needs to be done to tackle it?

Well, at the moment, initiatives like Operation Sentinel are trying to build up the capacity of criminal agencies and police agencies across the continent.

But they say that more needs to be done, particularly when it comes to keeping laws in African countries up to date with technological developments.

Now, this is an issue right across the world, that the technology is moving much faster than the law can move to try and stop it.

But Interpol is saying lots of African countries are doing a lot better, are trying to update their legislature so it's more in line with other countries around the world.

They're also working towards training police agencies, security agencies, so that they know more about digital crime.

And then they're also investing in these specialized units that can spot digital crimes early on.

So, for example, they gave an example of an attack on a government agency in Ghana that was spotted quite early by the digital team that was in charge of that, and

So if more of these initiatives are done, Interpol and other police agencies believe that they might be able to keep up with this.

But let's be very honest, this is a growing problem.

Some analysts have argued that this provides fertile ground for criminal gangs that work in the digital space to recruit people.

And so governments, policing agencies and international policing agencies are going to have to work a lot harder if they want to stop this from becoming an even bigger problem in years to come.

Miami, thank you, Miami Jones, speaking to us from Johannesburg.

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