It was a bright mid-morning in July 2024 and Accra was already busy. Cars moved along the Ring Road as people went about their day, while inside the nearby police facility where I worked as a digital forensics analyst, officers and detectives prepared for operational briefings and meetings ahead of Ghana’s general election. Amid this routine, a young woman arrived with a family member, referred by an NGO working in online safety. She sat in front of me, visibly distressed and contemplating suicide, and began to explain.
She had built what she believed was a friendship with another woman on TikTok. Over the course of weeks, trust grew, conversations turned personal, and promises of financial opportunities followed. Eventually, the ‘friend’ talked her into sharing nude videos.
Then everything changed. The same person who had spent weeks earning her trust sent her a phishing link. She clicked it, and within minutes lost access to her TikTok account, then her Gmail.
The suspect now had her accounts, her videos, and her entire contact list. The threats started immediately: send more exploitable content, or everything gets shared with her friends, family, and followers. She refused, so they followed through.
The videos spread on WhatsApp, and the suspect hijacked her TikTok account to post harmful content, repurposing the videos with misleading and reputationally damaging captions. As she and her family member sat in front of me asking for help, the suspect was still inside her accounts.
The response
The victim was in Ghana. The suspect used a Nigerian number on WhatsApp. Meta is based in the US, and TikTok is headquartered in both the US and Singapore. The woman being exploited needed help as fast as possible, faster than standard legal processes could work their way through three or four countries.
Instead, I turned to my networks – a trusted contact in Nigerian law enforcement, a financial sextortion investigator in the United States – and the emergency escalation channels platforms offer for imminent harm. The video was submitted to a hash-matching service, which lets platforms recognise and block copies of a known file, so any attempt to upload it on a participating platform was flagged and blocked automatically. TikTok worked directly with her to verify her identity and restore her account.
The most powerful tool I had was not forensic software. It was a collaboration built on trust and prior experience. That case moved forward quickly because I happened to have those contacts. Not every victim or every police officer is so lucky.
By the numbers
This case is not unique. Interpol’s 2025 Africa Cyberthreat Assessment found cyber-enabled crime cost the continent more than $3 billion between 2019 and 2025. TrendAI, one of Interpol’s private-sector partners, recorded 600,000 sextortion detections across Africa in 2025 alone.
The 2026 Africa Cyberthreat Assessment attributes the surge to AI’s growing ability to generate realistic synthetic images and video: 55% of cybercrime cases reported to Interpol in 2025 involved AI in some capacity, and reported losses more than doubled that year, from $192 million to $484 million.
The pipeline for platform help is thin. Law enforcement requests from African countries route through the same US-based Meta entity as the rest of the non-European world. Meta’s transparency reporting shows 374,516 government requests for user data worldwide in the first half of 2025, with some or all requested data provided in 78.70% of cases. India and the United States made the most requests, 135,548 and 81,064 respectively, with results 74.78% and 88.16% of the time. In Austria and the Czech Republic, which made 1,917 and 1,14 requests, they were at least partially filled over 90% of the time.
Africa barely registers by comparison. Morocco led with 612 requests, followed by Algeria with 45, South Africa with 40, and Tunisia with 26. Nigeria, despite having the largest population in Africa, made only six requests. Ghana made 12. And even though the numbers of requests were quite small, relatively few requests resulted in information being provided by Meta – South Africa received at least some data 60% of the time, while the number was only 40% for Algeria, 31.05% for Morocco, 16.67% for both Nigeria and Ghana, and 0% for Tunisia.
Most African countries submitted no requests at all. This is not about effort. It is about speed and results: the processes available to the wider law enforcement community move too slowly to matter in a live case, if they result in anything at all.
During Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict, for example, a flagged Facebook post targeting a Tigrayan professor stayed online for weeks, despite reports from the professor’s son and ‘trusted partners’ that the post could lead to harm. Eight days after the professor was shot and killed outside his home, by people referencing rumours spread on Facebook, Meta informed his son that the post was in violation of community standards and had been taken down.
And that was just a request for a post to be taken down, not for information about who posted it or for account access or any of the more complicated requests that African law enforcement must manage every day.
There are other approaches, but with them come other problems. Mutual legal assistance treaties, which countries use to formally request data from each other, can move through channels like Interpol’s National Central Bureaus. Yet only a handful of African countries have such a treaty with the US, where many widely used platforms are based, including Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Other platforms are similarly difficult for African countries to access. TikTok has real government engagement in Ghana and a global law enforcement channel, but that channel is just as slow to respond to requests. Even in cases where formal channels exist, the processes are built to run over weeks or months, not the minutes a victim watching a predator still logged into her account can spare.
How can African countries get faster responses for urgent cases?
There is already a formal answer on paper: the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime establishes a ‘24/7 Network’, which allows a contact point in one country to reach a counterpart in another for urgent evidence preservation. It works, as far as it goes. However, the network’s job is to provide governments with a formal channel for preserving evidence. It does not get a hijacked TikTok account back from a predator.
And besides – look at who’s a member: as of mid-2026, a large majority of Africa’s 54 countries have not ratified the Budapest Convention, and joining will take political will and years.
Interpol’s own African Joint Operation against Cybercrime, running since 2021 with UK backing, has made real progress too. Its Operation Serengeti 2.0 alone led to more than 1,200 arrests across 18 African countries and the UK.
But these sorts of coordinated operations still do little to help the individual victim in a police station. Even where a relationship with a platform’s safety team exists, a regional investigator must typically escalate through their own chain of command to a national desk before the platform is ever contacted, adding delay before the international problem even starts.
What must change
Closing this gap through personal contacts worked once for me, because I happened to have them. It should not take one investigator’s phone book to get a victim’s account back. There should be a system in place.
That system should do two things. First, give African law enforcement a recognised regional contact with major platforms, closer to what Meta’s Irish entity does for Europe. Africa’s 54 countries could be served through existing regional blocs, such as ECOWAS for West Africa, ECCAS for Central Africa, the SADC for Southern Africa, and COMESA for Eastern and Southern Africa, each hosting a platform entity accountable to that bloc’s own laws rather than a foreign jurisdiction. Africa has nearly twice as many people as Europe – they deserve representation and access too.
Second, decentralise the national points of contact that the major platforms already maintain. Currently, emergency escalation is only possible through a handful of officers at national headquarters. Extending that same vetted access to trained investigators at regional stations would prevent cases from stalling simply because the officer who took the report is not the one with the contacts.
Cybercriminals do not need a passport to cross borders. Our collaboration should not need one either.
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