The Solicitor-General of the Federation and Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Justice, Mrs. Beatrice Jedy-Agba, recently reeled out frightening figures on cybercrime in Nigeria. She warned that Nigeria loses $250 billion annually to cybercrimes.
The figure is frightening because it makes the impact of cybercrimes in a highly developed economy like Canada pale into insignificance. Canada’s losses to cybercrimes just inched up to $1 billion in 2023.
Canada is a highly developed economy with a gross domestic product (GDP) standing menacingly at $2.1 trillion, while Nigeria is crawling with a paltry GDP of $368.8 billion.
The yawning disparity emphatically underscores the alarming rate of cybercrime in Nigeria and why the figure announced by the solicitor-general is frightening.
Cybercrimes are perpetrated with information technology (IT), including the internet. Cybercriminals use computers, mobile devices and their networks in their operations. The crime involves fraudulent electronic mail, identity theft, hacking, ATM fraud, and BVN scams, among others.
Cybercrime is a threat to financial assets, private information and even personal safety. It threatens business operations and institutions as cybercriminals hack into databases to steal or corrupt protected information.
The surge in internet access in Nigeria has resulted in a tremendous growth in cybercrime. About 155 million Nigerians have access to the internet. Some months ago, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) made astonishing revelations about the magnitude of cybercrimes in Nigeria.
Some university undergraduates were arrested for what is known in Nigeria as ‘Yahoo, Yahoo’ operations. The Executive Chairman of the EFCC, Olukoyede Olanipekun, picked one of the suspects, a student of History, for personal interrogation. The suspect shocked the chairman with his command of cybercrime. As he was being interrogated, he circumvented the rugged security measures in Olanipekun’s laptop and accessed his bank account. The chairman was startled when the suspect warned him that he could withdraw a minimum of N10 million in a day from his account.
Olanipekun introduced a measure of humanitarianism into his handling of the sophisticated cybercriminal sitting before him. When he asked him why he went into crime, the suspect replied that he used the proceeds to pay the school fees of his siblings as his parents are poor.
Moved by unalloyed sympathy, Olanipekun called prominent Nigerian philanthropists and secured financial protection for the suspect and his siblings in school. Rather than charging the suspect to court where he would have almost certainly earned a long jail term, he released him and warned him never to return to crime.
There are fears that the hardship in the land has compelled many young Nigerians to switch to cybercrime. People get strange calls on a daily basis alerting them falsely about withdrawals in their bank accounts. The callers are cybercriminals who lure the uninformed into releasing vital information about their accounts that enable them to make huge withdrawals from the accounts of the innocent depositors.
Even the banks, with all their sophisticated protective software, are not immune to cyberattacks. A few months ago, the First Bank of Nigeria was shocked to discover that one of its managers withdrew N40 billion from customers’ accounts over a period of two years. The fraud was only discovered when a customer who lost money in his account to the operations of the cybercriminal alerted the bank. The cybercriminal is still on the run while the bank is licking its wounds. That single caper drastically reduced the dividend declared by the bank for the 2023 business year.
The figure announced by the Solicitor-General of the Federation might be a tiny fraction of what Nigerians lose to cybercrimes. The truth is that only a tiny fraction of the crimes are reported to the police. People tend to ignore the crime where the figure involved is not in six digits or above. Ironically, cybercrime is gaining sophistication as many youth specialise in information technology. There was an incident in a first generation bank in Nigeria some years ago involving an expert in IT. The young man developed a software that banks could use to protect their depositors’ funds from cybercriminals.
He went to the first generation bank to market the software, hoping to make millions from his expertise. The bank rejected the software. A week later, the young man used the software and hacked into the bank’s account and withdrew N2 billion. The withdrawal was not noticed for two weeks until the young man alerted the bank of the intrusion.
Blueprint is worried that cybercrime is assuming alarming proportions even with the collection of the biodata of Nigerians by the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC). We, therefore, enjoin the agencies involved in the fight against cybercrime to use the data to track cybercriminals. Besides, the growing sophistication of cybercrime and its cross-border nature necessitates international collaboration and strategic response.
Blueprint Newspapers on WhatsAp-Join now!