INTERPOL ties AI to 55% of African cybercrime

INTERPOL says AI enabled 55% of reported cybercrime across Africa, while regional cybercrime losses more than doubled from $192 million in 2024 to $484 million, according to its 40-page assessment of 36 member countries. The report also found scam centres in 72% of surveyed countries, extending the governance problem beyond the frontier-model controls examined in the week leading AI labs restricted cyber capabilities. Builders selling fraud detection or identity verification in African markets should file away the scale signal: synthetic identities and automated scams are now baseline threat-model assumptions, not edge cases.