SIM swap, sextortion, fake officials: meet Cameroon’s data predators 🚨🇨🇲

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The first three episodes of this series described structured actors: companies following a business model, governments exercising legal — if contested — authority. This fourth episode shifts register entirely. There’s no mandate here, no declared business model. Just pure predation.

Cybercriminals need no heavy infrastructure, no regulatory framework, no institutional legitimacy. They need a smartphone, an internet connection, and your data. In Cameroon, as across the continent, they’re the actors causing the most direct and painful harm at the individual level today.

Cameroon, by the numbers 📊

Recent national figures give a concrete measure of the problem. According to figures presented by Minister of Posts and Telecommunications Minette Libom Li Likeng before the National Assembly during the 2026 budget review, Cameroon lost more than 1.027 billion CFA francs in 2025 to online scams. The damage stems primarily from email scams, phishing, and fraudulent investment platforms.

The National Information and Communication Technologies Agency (ANTIC) recorded 471 cases of scamming and phishing during the year, involving the impersonation of web addresses and emails belonging to banks, private companies, and public administrations. More broadly, the agency processed 32,500 judicial requisitions in 2025 — a 30% increase over 2024 — related to offenses committed using digital technologies.

One figure deserves particular attention: since January 2024, ANTIC has identified 8,499 fake accounts impersonating senior state officials or public institutions. Through cooperation with platforms like Facebook and TikTok, 6,416 of these accounts have been shut down. This number illustrates a simple reality: digital identity theft is not a marginal phenomenon in Cameroon. It’s an active, organized industry — one that directly targets citizens’ trust in institutions.

Mobile money, target number one 📱

If one category of fraud dominates the Cameroonian and African landscape, it’s the kind that directly targets mobile money — a service that has become indispensable to millions of Cameroonians’ daily lives.

At the continental scale, the problem is enormous. According to an in-depth investigation published by Technext, losses linked to mobile money fraud and identity theft across Africa total approximately $4 billion. INTERPOL’s 2025 Africa Cyberthreat Assessment more broadly estimates annual cybercrime losses at $3 to $4 billion, with some analysts suggesting the real figure could be double, given massive underreporting.

The most formidable technique remains SIM swapping — hijacking your phone number onto a SIM card controlled by a fraudster. The mechanism is simple and brutally effective: the criminal gathers enough personal information about you — often through social media, phishing, or data already compromised in earlier breaches — to convince a telecom agent that they are you. Once the transfer is completed, they receive your SMS messages, your two-factor verification codes, and can drain your mobile money account within minutes.

What makes this fraud particularly dangerous in the African context is its reliance on a human weak point rather than a technical one: overwhelmed, undertrained agents, or partner shops that don’t always have the necessary biometric verification tools. A study conducted in neighboring Ghana documented that franchise agents sometimes skip biometric checks when national verification systems are slow or offline — a structural vulnerability that isn’t unique to a single country in the region.

Love as a weapon: romance scams and sextortion 💔

There is a category of cybercrime that exploits not a technical flaw but a universal human vulnerability: the need for emotional connection. Romance scams and sextortion are expanding alarmingly across the African continent — and Cameroon is no exception.

The scam typically follows a recognizable pattern: a carefully built profile, often using stolen or AI-generated photos, initiates an online relationship with the victim. Once trust and emotional attachment are established, the scenario shifts — a medical emergency, an investment opportunity, a gift stuck in customs — requiring a money transfer. In sextortion cases, the scammer obtains intimate images from the victim before threatening to release them publicly unless a payment is made.

Generative AI tools have considerably increased the sophistication of these scams: realistic AI-generated photos, fake video calls, cloned voices — making deception far harder to detect than just a few years ago.

The scale of the phenomenon is well documented. According to INTERPOL’s 2025 Africa Cyberthreat Assessment, 60% of African member countries reported a rise in digital sextortion cases. That same year, an INTERPOL-coordinated operation dismantled organized networks across 14 African countries, leading to 260 arrests. One detail is directly relevant to our readership: in 2025, Meta said it deleted more than 100,000 accounts linked to romance scam networks originating from several African countries, including Cameroon.

Why is Africa a prime target? 🎯

This question deserves a direct answer. Several structural factors explain why the African continent — and Cameroon in particular — is a particularly favorable ground for cybercrime.

The first factor is the speed of digital adoption relative to the pace of awareness-building. Millions of people access the internet for the first time via a smartphone, without prior training on digital risks, creating an imbalance criminals know how to exploit.

The second factor is regulatory and institutional capacity. INTERPOL notes that two-thirds of African member countries surveyed report cyber offenses make up a medium-to-high share of all recorded crime — while also reporting difficulty enforcing existing laws. According to the same report, 95% of African member countries say they lack adequate training, resources, and access to specialized tools to combat cybercrime. In Cameroon, the 2010 cybersecurity law remains the reference text — one written for a digital landscape very different from today’s.

The third factor is economic. Romance scams and sextortion represent, according to experts cited across multiple specialized analyses, a low-barrier-to-entry criminal activity — a smartphone or computer is enough, with no deep technical skill required — for a potentially high payout. In difficult economic contexts, that equation attracts organized networks seeking targets worldwide, but also locally.

What Cameroon’s response reveals 🛡️

It would be unfair to present Cameroon as passive in the face of this phenomenon. ANTIC has significantly stepped up its monitoring and response efforts, as shown by the figures on judicial requisitions and fraudulent account takedowns. At the continental level, coordinated operations like Serengeti and Red Card, jointly led by INTERPOL and AFRIPOL, have resulted in more than 1,000 arrests and the dismantling of hundreds of malicious networks across the continent.

But institutional response, real as it is, doesn’t protect the individual at the exact moment they receive a fraudulent message, a suspicious call, or an emotionally manipulative request for money. That’s where the real line of defense lies: individual vigilance, awareness of fraud mechanisms, and simple protective habits — which we’ll detail in the next episode of this series.

The series’ turning point 🔄

With this episode, we’ve now covered the full ecosystem interested in your data: companies that monetize it, states that monitor it, and now criminals who exploit it directly against you.

The picture is bleak. It’s also, deliberately, complete — because effective protection starts with a precise understanding of the risk. In the next episode, we tackle the most common argument used to dismiss everything covered so far: « I’ve got nothing to hide. » We’ll see why that argument, appealing on the surface, doesn’t hold up under scrutiny — and why it’s particularly dangerous in the context we’ve just described.

💬 Join the conversation: Have you, or someone close to you, ever been a victim of mobile money fraud, a SIM swap, or an online romance scam? What signals do you think could have raised the alarm earlier? Share your experience — it could protect someone else.

This article is part of What You’re Worth, TechGriot’s series on the personal data economy.