African law enforcement agencies and cybercriminals are almost equally exposed to AI. But they are not adopting it at the same speed, according to Interpol’s African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026.
AI was involved in 55% of cybercrime cases observed by African countries surveyed by Interpol in 2025, as criminals used the technology to produce convincing phishing messages, fabricate identities, and impersonate executives and public figures. Deepfake incidents increased sevenfold between the second and fourth quarters of 2024.
The police pursuing them are adopting the same technology much more slowly. Only 8% of intelligence analysts surveyed had advanced AI expertise, while 92% of agencies cited a lack of technical expertise as their main obstacle to using AI. Most still relied on manual processes.
“Criminals are now operating at machine speed,” Interpol said. Law enforcement, by contrast, remains constrained by “legal processes, bureaucratic delays, and a lack of technical capacity”.
Making sophistication cheaper
The imbalance is opening a new front in the AI boom. The technology is making common forms of fraud, such as phishing and SIM-swaps, cheaper and easier to scale faster than the institutions responsible for stopping them can adapt.
Phishing, identity theft, and financial fraud predate AI. What has changed is the amount of work and expertise required to carry them out convincingly and at scale.
Interpol said generative AI tools that were once the preserve of researchers and developers have become accessible and are being “weaponised by criminal actors with minimal technical expertise”.