Cybercrime Impacting Nigeria’s Economy Negatively — EFCC

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has said cybercrime is impacting negatively on the Nigerian economy.

The commission highlighted these through CSE Allison James Taiwo, Head, Advance Fee Fraud Section, Benin Zonal Command, during the EFCC connect on Wednesday.

Taiwo said the first thing that cybercrime does in a business environment is to pose a threat in the economic space, adding that one of the disadvantages is that it erodes trust, making people afraid of participating in e-commerce platforms.

He said there are a lot of people who cannot easily go online and buy things because of the fear of online scammers on social media who might have dealt them a blow in the past.

He however, noted that, “Ordinarily, there are good people who are doing their legitimate businesses online, but because of the fear of the scammers there, people will not want to participate, thereby spoiling the businesses of their legitimate buyers.

“For instance, I have a sister who ordered a wig last month and the wig was never delivered, and she said she will never participate again (in online transactions), so that is lost; a job is lost when trust is lost.”

The EFCC Officer also mentioned financial loss on the part of the country. He explained that most of the time individuals or organisations do not report finances lost to fraudsters either because of how big the money is or how impactful it is, and so the money is gone for good.

“Most of the time because of the plethora of cases it is even difficult for law enforcement agencies to investigate all financial loss by individuals as well as organisations.

“We have financial loss to the country because the country loses money when people lose their money to online fraud, cyber attacks and so on,” he pointed out.

Taiwo also mentioned the loss of intellectual property, citing examples of most Nollywood actors who produce their movies and put it online and before daybreak, it has already been pirated and distributed to hawkers on the street. Such he said is a huge loss to both the producer and economy.

He said the existence of cybercrime in itself is a great loss to the economy because money used to investigate cyber crimes could have been used to develop infrastructure making life easy for people.

He also highlighted that when services are denied we face problems with foreign investment too.

“I will make some certain examples to buttress my point, let’s imagine when the use of ATM technology was first introduced in Nigeria, it took a very long time for people to accept it because there’s that fear of financial loss, people did not trust it.

“We also have a lot of reputation damage when trust in transactions on e-commerce is eroded; there’s trust problem which leads to reputation problem.

“We look at what happened in January during the naira redesign programme when a lot of banking systems and applications were failing, they had to struggle to gain back the trust of customers, most times if you mention the name of a bank people will say no please get out of it, although I’m not saying that was due to cybercrime or cyber activities.

“We also have unemployment where cybercriminals are making money but genuine participants, online communities used to loose their profits which leads to loss of employment,” Taiwo said.