Cybercriminality : The image of Benin undermined

In Benin they are called “Gayman”. In fact, they are nothing but scammers who use the internet to steal money from their victims. With time, they ended up ruining the reputation of an entire country.

According to several media, five people including four Beninese and the French companion of one of them, were arrested in mid-November 2022 and placed under judicial supervision by the Dunkirk public prosecutor's office in the north of France. The interested parties are prosecuted for "organized gang fraud and money laundering". In fact, they sold fictitious agricultural equipment to individuals and companies in Europe and the United States. For the moment, forty victims have been identified and the amount of the scam is estimated at 520 million Euros i.e. 338 billion CFA francs. To succeed in their package, they have created online sales sites on behalf of agricultural equipment sale companies that do not have websites. The police investigation, which lasted more than a year, started when one of the buyers contacted the alleged seller and became aware of the scam.

This information comes at a time when a former Beninese deputy was imprisoned on 4 last November by justice for a completely different case of scam by way of Internet. The latter is suspected of having tried to organize the virtual heist of a Beninese bank. In the hope of winning thus between 2,5 and 3 billion CFA francs, he would have initially brought to Benin a hacker (computer systems intrusion specialist) Tanzanian before resorting to the skills of an Ivorian. After vain attempts, he invited a Senegalese but faced with the failure of all these specialists, he convinced his accomplices, a branch manager and an employee, to use the skills of the bank's IT specialist, who denounced them.

While waiting for Justice to clear or confirm the charges against the defendants, it is important to remember that the main defendant in this latest case is a repeat offender. Sentenced in 2011, he has already spent three years in prison in a case of sale of 980 kg of fictitious gold to a group of American and South African businessmen.

These latest cases rekindle the thorny problem of fighting cybercrime in Benin. Faced with the ingenuity of scammers, the police remain ineffective, methods evolving over time. The internet scam started years ago 1997 when young people posed as homosexuals – hence the name “Gayman”- to lure victims mostly gays and lesbians living in Europe.

At the beginning, the scam in Benin was organized by Nigerians forced to relocate to Benin and Ivory Coast after their country took bold action against the phenomenon. This is how in 1997 a Nigerian national got delivered 40 computers, 10 printers and more 1000 bibles against a check issued by a fictitious bank. Since, the Beninese took over through emails in approximate French to end up perfecting themselves to the point of exceeding the master.

Over the past two decades, the “Gayman” sold everything in Benin : public squares, dogs, cars, houses… except none of this is a scam. The case that caused the most noise was the sale to a European investor of Place de l'Etoile Rouge in the heart of Cotonou.. What, sure, was a complete scam.

Faced with all this, the officials in charge of repression do what they can but without succeeding in stopping the system. One of the causes is due to the fact that more and more scammers are specialists in various fields of IT and who, by their profile, are sometimes more competent than those who are in charge of fighting them.

This whole situation has a negative effect on the reputation of all Beninese. Today, in some neighboring countries, the Beninese name rhymes with banditry and scam. This contrasts with the reputation enjoyed by the country for decades.

Near 1000 cybercriminals have since been arrested 2016 in Benin

And the war is not over yet. In fact, since 2016, about a thousand individuals have thus fallen into the cracks of the authorities in charge of the fight against cybercrime. Small country known for its calm has seen its reputation take a hit since the beginning of the years 2000 when young people discovered the possibility of scamming Europeans through the internet. Often cloning commercial websites or pretending to be just businessmen, they offer fictitious services to their prey. Once the money has been pocketed, they cover their tracks and disappear. Gradually, the methods of these young people who operated from cybercafés were refined.

The State began to take the phenomenon seriously by adopting, in 2011, the law on the fight against corruption. This has in its article 124 that "anyone who has falsified computerized documents, whatever their form, likely to cause harm to others, is punished by imprisonment of one to five years and a fine of two million CFA francs to twenty million. This law has been supplemented by the Digital Code, which is a particularly repressive tool.

Despite this, cybercriminals always had the wind in their sails until the Central Office for the Suppression of Cybercrime was set up (Ocrc) printer living in Abomey-Calavi agrees, today, is the real armed arm of the government in the field. With a political will displayed by the authorities and according to certain official statistics, these are approximately 600 people who have been apprehended in this way in the past three years. This augurs well for the future of this fight, which seems to be an endless fight, as cybercriminals are so fertile in creativity..

Pierre MATCHOUDO