Cyber Criminals Inflict 3Billion FCFA Loss on Cameroon Banks

Cyber criminals often target ATM terminals like this one

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 Local and international banks operating in Cameroon lost not less than 3 billion FCFA to cyber criminals in 2015, Dr. Ebot Ebot Enaw, Director General of the National Agency for Information And Communications Technology (abbreviated in French as ANTIC), has said.
He made the disclosure, Tuesday March 1, during a forum organized in Yaounde to sensitize the public on the challenges being posed by Internet criminals on countries like Cameroon that are still struggling to emerge.
Enaw disclosed that many banks in the country were victims of cyber criminals as shown in a survey his institution carried out covering the year 2015.
The key method the criminals use, he said was ‘skimming’; a phenomenon in which the criminals pirate the electronic bank cards of their victims. They then go to automatic teller machine (ATM) to withdraw money from the bank accounts of their victims.


Apart from banks, Enaw said even mobile phone companies have been and are victims of cyber criminality. “The existence of a method where people in foreign countries are, through mobile phone calls able to transfer money from abroad to people in Cameroon by the use of Simbox has opened a door for criminals to engage in transactions that are fraudulent thereby causing untold losses to mobile phone companies and the state.
“It was through this Simbox operation that one mobile phone company lost 38 billion FCFA to cyber criminals,” Enaw disclosed, without mentioning the name of the mobile phone company.
In addition, he said not less than 20 government establishments, but most especially the National Assembly and the Cameroon Radio and Television have fallen prey to cyber criminals who used ‘web defacement’ to extort money from these category of victims.
He added that web crimes take multiple forms with many of the criminals maintaining persistent onslaughts of attacks on websites belonging to prominent institutions and organizations while the criminals at the same time keep changing their websites making it hard to monitor. “ANTIC was able to unveil some 100 cases where cyber criminals attacked websites in an attempt to get the e-mails of some personalities; while some 700 cases of ‘scamming’ were uncovered,” the expert disclosed.
He added that up to 90% of computers used in the country have been pirated by cyber criminals and described the Cameroon cyber space as facing a real cyber war.
Enow’s views were corroborated by Commissioner of Police N’tangh Bay Emile of the General Delegation for National Security, DGSN, who said cyber criminality has become a real cause for concern. “In terms of the incidence of perpetration of cyber criminality in Africa, Cameroon comes third after Nigeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast. 
Cameroon used to occupy the fourth position but not long ago Ivory Coast put in place some stringent measures that have helped to reduce the incidence of cybercrime in that country, reason why Cameroon has now overtaken her to occupy the third position,” N’tangh Bay disclosed.
The police boss described those who resort to earning a living through cyber criminality as very cunning and called for mass education of the public so that they should guard themselves from falling prey to cyber criminals.
Apart from enhancing public awareness, he said the government needed to take new approaches to training security personnel, with special emphasis given on how to train a new generation of police men who would be capable of monitoring the national cyber space so as to nib all attempts of cyber criminals defrauding citizens from the bud.
“Cyber police officers should be trained and assigned specific roles like identifying, locating and tracking down cyber criminals. Even though we are already doing this, it is still on a limited scale that needs to be expanded,” the police officer said.