ICT Crimes in Cameroon : ANTIC Trains Police, Magistrates Against Cybercrimes

Justice Paul Ngute, President of the South West Court of Appeal, who sat in for the Minister of State, Minister of Justice, Keeper of the Seals, has voiced that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in their meteoric growth have given rise to a new scourge, which is cybercrime. He defined cybercrime as any action consisting in using computer systems and networks as a tool, a target or link for carrying out criminal activities. The learned Justice was addressing Police and Magistrates at the opening of a three-day awareness training of Judiciary and Legal Officers in Limbe, last 2 July, 2023, organized by the National Agency for Information and Communications Technologies (French acronym, ANTIC). Justice Ngute explained that the training in Limbe, the eighth, in a series across the country was to buttress digital public policy, security monitoring, and the gathering of digital evidence, as well as the way computer malware should henceforth be addressed. For men and women of the legal profession. The man of Law went on to stress that Government would no longer be a by-stander in the face of such cybercrimes that even touch on state-security by posting sensitive documents on social media. More so, unrelated images are imported from other countries to simulate violence and ignite tensions in Cameroon.
To that end, Justice Ngute announced that the Minister of State, Minister of Justice, keeper of the Seals had prescribed proactivity and firmness to ensure that such attitudes no longer go unpunished. By the end of the Limbe workshop, the Judiciary and the legal practitioners shall have imbibed sufficient insights to detect sources and perpetrators of cybercrime and to specify the treatment that awaits the offenders. The South West Regional Head of ANTIC, Basong Egbe Divine, represented the Director General of ANTIC calling on the participants to pick the details of the various technical presentations. He revealed that scamming using ICTs represented 80 percent of cybercrime cases in Cameroon by 2021, a public danger that caused estimated financial losses of CFA 7 billion since 2010. He went on to explain that the most flourishing of cybercrimes was phishing. Phishing attacks leverage social engineering by spoofing an emai...