Soaring cybercrime alarming - IG

The Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris, has described as alarming, the rate of cybercrime in Nigeria. He attributed the increasing trend to greed.



The IGP spoke in Abuja yesterday during the Interpol Cybercrime Training for Practitioner Investigators from African Countries.

To however curb the increasing trend and outsmart the perpetrators, the IGP noted that he has established a Cybercrime Unit within the Interpol National Central Bureau in Nigeria, which will tackle the challenges of cybercrime down to the local government level.

Idris revealed that efforts are on to equip the unit with the tools and techniques to boost its capacities in fields such as IP crime enquiries, identity fraud, online tracking of suspects, electronic crime scene investigation, and the forensic examination of computers, computer networks and mobile devices.

The IG, who was represented by the Deputy Inspector General of Police in charge of Force Criminal Intelligence and Investigation, DIG Hycent Dagala, said: “Investigating offences in the cyberspace has assumed a major policing requirement in Nigeria and, I guess, other jurisdictions across Africa.

“Cybercriminals have enjoyed a long start ahead of law enforcement and inflicted serious injuries on the citizens we have sworn to protect. While we continue to grapple with traditional methods of policing, emerging trends in crime now deploy new skills and technologies. We must in turn, therefore, develop new ways and methods to adapt to current challenges.

“Capacity building is one of the methods we can use to combat cybercrime. The training will help look into new methods being invented by the perpetrators of crime generally and then try to go above them.

“We are not only limiting our capacities to training of this nature but as much as possible, we are ensuring that even the calibre of people we are recruiting these days are higher than what we were doing before and the essence of this is to get manpower that can comprehend new teachings and new technology with a view give Nigerians the best police force.”

Head of training of Interpol Cybercrime Directorate, Wei Xian Tee, said cybercrime was not peculiar to Nigeria. He added that traditional forms of crime are finding its way into the cyberspace.