African law enforcement agencies are facing a growing speed gap in the fight against crypto-enabled financial crime, with illicit funds able to move across borders within minutes while traditional legal and investigative processes can take months.
As crypto adoption grows across the region, banks, fintechs, crypto exchanges and other financial institutions are being urged to employ real-time fraud and mule detection systems that can flag and intercept suspicious transactions before victims lose money, rather than trying to trace funds after they are gone.
This is according to Philip Adiamah, regional manager for Africa at Chainalysis, a blockchain data platform, speaking to ITWeb Africa about the growing sophistication and geographic spread of organised fraud networks.
Adiamah said: "The biggest weaknesses are speed and interoperability. Crypto moves in minutes; mutual legal assistance requests can take months.”
The problem extends beyond individual scams, with organised criminal groups increasingly operating across multiple jurisdictions and using shared financial infrastructure to move proceeds from different types of crime.
Adiamah said the same laundering networks and platforms can facilitate proceeds from romance scams, investment fraud, trafficking-linked operations and other organised criminal activity, creating a broader criminal ecosystem that does not respect national borders.
He explained: "Laundering techniques aren't secluded to a particular region or crime type. Our research shows that the same infrastructure, including Chinese-language money laundering networks and guarantee platforms like Xinbi, serve multiple crime types simultaneously.
“Xinbi's vendor network, for example, advertised money laundering alongside stolen data sales, scam platform development, surveillance equipment and recruitment for forced-labour scam compounds.”
Chainalysis' 2026 Crypto Crime Report estimates that $17 billion was stolen through crypto scams and fraud in 2025.
For African countries, the challenge is compounded by differences in regulatory frameworks, investigative capabilities and access to specialist blockchain-analysis tools.
Cryptocurrency itself can provide investigators with a valuable evidence trail, since transactions are permanently recorded on public blockchains — but the bigger challenge is having the expertise and institutional capacity to interpret that data and act on it quickly.
"Every transaction is recorded on a public, immutable ledger, which means crypto actually leaves a better evidence trail than cash. The difficulty is not whether funds can be traced, but whether investigators have the training and tools to do so," Adiamah said.
A case in Ghana, involving the Economic and Organised Crime Office, the UK National Crime Agency and Europol, demonstrates what faster cooperation can achieve. Investigators working from shared blockchain intelligence were able to freeze approximately $15.1 million in illicit assets, according to Chainalysis.
The company said such cooperation needs to become more common across African jurisdictions, with agencies able to share evidence and coordinate action rather than relying on lengthy information and legal requests.
Pressure is also mounting as criminals adopt new technologies to scale their operations.
Chainalysis said its research found AI-enabled scams were 4.5 times more profitable than traditional scams, with criminals increasingly using deepfakes, face-swapping software and large language models to create convincing impersonations.
Looking ahead, Adiamah warned: "We also expect further industrialisation of fraud infrastructure: phishing-as-a-service kits can be purchased for as little as $50 in cryptocurrency, and bulk social media accounts are sold on Chinese-language platforms for use in targeting victims."
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