Cybercriminals across Africa have moved from using Artificial Intelligence as a supporting tool to relying on it as the central driver of their operations, according to the INTERPOL African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026.

The report states that "the year 2025 marked the definitive transition from AI as a supporting tool to AI as the core operational driver of cybercrime in Africa”.

It found that 55 percent of cybercrime cases recorded in 2025 involved AI in some capacity with 47 percent of cases using it occasionally and 8 percent frequently.

According to the report, "AI is now used to automate every stage of the attack lifecycle: from reconnaissance and phishing to extortion and evasion”.

Deep fake-related incidents rose sevenfold across the continent between the second and fourth quarters of 2024. 

In Uganda, "a deepfake video of a prominent public figure was circulated to promote a fraudulent investment scheme, resulting in more than USD 2 million in losses before authorities intervened”.

The report also flagged a new ransomware strain, PromptLock, which it says "uses generative AI to autonomously write, adapt, and execute its own malicious code, a level of customization previously only possible through human labour”.

Despite the scale of the shift, INTERPOL found law enforcement's response has lagged badly behind. 

The report notes that "92 per cent of agencies cite a lack of technical expertise as the primary barrier to adopting AI tools," while only 8 percent of intelligence analysts have advanced AI expertise.

Neal Jetton, INTERPOL's Director of Cybercrime, wrote in the report's foreword that "cyber-criminality has evolved from isolated incidents into an industrialized, borderless ecosystem”.

The report concludes that "criminals are now operating at machine speed, with AI enabling attacks that are faster, more scalable, and more difficult to attribute. Law enforcement, by contrast, remains constrained by legal processes, bureaucratic delays, and a lack of technical capacity”.