Scammers in West Africa rely on silence, not system breaks, workshop finds

Most financial scams in West Africa do not involve hacking or breaking into banking systems. According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, the method is simpler: persuade the person, then move fast before they tell anyone.

That was the core finding shared at a workshop in Accra, where regulators, banks, payment providers, law enforcement and civil society met to agree practical actions against scams and fraud across the region. Dr. Robinson Tombari Sibe, CEO and Lead Forensic Examiner at Digital Footprints, told the workshop that fraud is following consumers into the digital economy as mobile money adoption grows.

Persuasion, then speed, then silence

Account ownership in Ghana now exceeds 81% of adults. Bank of Ghana data shows reported fraud cases rose from 15,865 in 2023 to 16,733 in 2024, with the value at risk climbing from GH¢88 million to GH¢99 million. Sibe explained that scammers do not need to defeat a bank's defences. They only need to defeat a person's judgement in the moment, then move the money through fast payment rails before the victim has time to check.

The sequence shows where the scam actually depends on something fixable. It is not the payment rail that is exploited first; it is the absence of a pause between persuasion and transfer. Once money moves through mobile networks at speed, recovery becomes far harder. That gap between the moment someone is convinced and the moment money leaves their account is the single point where the scam can still be stopped.

Barr. Sam Chigozie Otoboeze, President of the Barr. Sam Otoboeze Foundation, added a second piece to the mechanism: scale. Citing the INTERPOL African Cyberthreat Assessment 2026, he said 55% of reported cybercrime in Africa is now AI-enabled, with reported losses more than doubling to $484 million. GASA research found that 82% of African adults encountered a scam in the past year, but only 5% reported it to authorities.

The silence is part of the mechanism, not a footnote

That 5% reporting rate is not a separate problem from the scam itself. It is the second half of how the scam works. A victim who stays quiet, often out of embarrassment, leaves the method untouched for the next target. Sibe's proposed response treats this directly: a shame-free reporting channel, alongside friction built into the moment of payment, verification through a separate trusted channel, and mobile money agents trained to notice and intervene.

None of those steps require new laws. Otoboeze argued that Africa's gap is not a lack of cybercrime legislation but a lack of interoperable capability between banks, telecoms and law enforcement across borders. A scam that starts in one country and reaches a victim in another, through several platforms within minutes, outruns any single institution that cannot share information quickly with the next one in the chain.