In a sweeping month-long operation, law enforcement agencies in 19 African nations arrested 574 suspects and recovered about $3 million in illicit funds, as part of an Interpol-led crackdown on surging cyber threats plaguing the continent.
Dubbed Operation Sentinel, and running from late October to late November of this year, the initiative targeted three fast-growing forms of cybercrime: business email compromise (BEC) schemes, digital extortion, and ransomware attacks.
More than 6,000 malicious web links were taken down, and investigators decrypted six ransomware variants, stating that the crimes disrupted were estimated to have caused potential losses exceeding $21 million, which is significantly more than 2 billion Kenyan shillings.
The operation was conducted under Interpol’s African Joint Operation against Cybercrime (AFJOC) framework, with funding from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, as well as the EU–Council of Europe’s GLACY-e project. Private-sector partners, including Trend Micro, Shadowserver and TRM Labs, provided critical intelligence on threats and asset tracing.
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Participating countries included Kenya, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Djibouti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Notable actions included Senegal’s prevention of a $7.9 million loss in a BEC scam targeting a petroleum company, achieved through the swift freezing of suspicious accounts. In Ghana, authorities dismantled a cross-border fraud network that impersonated fast-food brands, defrauding more than 200 victims of over $400,000, while also developing a decryption tool to recover nearly 30 terabytes of data from a ransomware attack that got more than 100 terabytes of data in the hand of criminals.
Benin recorded 106 arrests after shutting down dozens of malicious domains and thousands of fraudulent social media accounts.
Neal Jetton, Interpol’s Director of Cybercrime, said: “The scale and sophistication of cyberattacks across Africa are accelerating, especially against critical sectors like finance and energy. The outcomes from Operation Sentinel reflect the commitment of African law enforcement agencies, working in close coordination with international partners. Their actions have successfully protected livelihoods, secured sensitive personal data, and preserved critical infrastructure.”
Interpol’s latest assessment found that cyber offences now constitute a medium-to-high proportion of all crimes in two-thirds of surveyed African countries, underscoring the urgent need for sustained regional cooperation amid the continent’s rapid digital growth.
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