Do you know globally about 1.5 million are victim of cybercrimes daily?

Today! I will be talking on an itching relegated issue that bothers around a recent exposed report confirming Nigeria’s status as a global kingpin in cybercrime.

Good day and welcome to a special edition of #AwakeningYou, a Tuesday weekly script of #StartupNigeria. My name is Haastrup Steven.

One of the most damning indictments of Nigeria in the eyes of the world is the relatively high incidence of cybercrime in the country. Instead of using the latest advancements in information and communication technology for positive ends, many of our young people use them to commit horrendous crimes. What irks is not that cybercrimes are committed by Nigerians; indeed what miffs the world is the fact that, like in many other areas of life, crimes goes unpunished and a fertile ground is thus created for the germination of such anti-social behavior.

Cybercrime is a worldwide phenomenon. Most countrieshave devised methodical procedures for intercepting and investigating criminal activities on the World Wide Web. Nigeria ranks third behind the United States and the UK among countries with high occurrence of cybercrime.

Recent studies have shown that 66 percent of internet fraud was perpetrated from the United States, about 10 percent from the UK and 8 percent from Nigeria. In terms of technological development, Nigeria is far behind the US and UK but it rubs shoulders with them in cybercrime, thereby making the headlines of the world’s leading media for the wrong reasons. This has impacted negatively on the image of the countryto such an extent that in many parts of the world, every Nigerian is proven guilty of cybercrime until proven innocent.

Predictably, a Nigerian scam is listed in a class of its own worldwide. There is no category known as South African or Ghanaian cybercrime. Today, we experience it, our e-mail accounts are filled up with scam mails, some fall for some while others don’t. The common and current trendtoday is sending mails with a pretense to be from credible source (Banks especially) and asking the recipient to confirm personal info, this trick has been used to defraud bank customers who are fooled into parting with vital information which is then used by the fraudsters to access and divert their funds.

Now, what can we do? It’s obvious the Government don’t care about how this affects our image as they are no sound laws against them, probably because it’s just a branch of corruption as we all know that cybercrimes are perpetrated by the grass root while the Government skims the top.

As responsible citizens, to start with, we must quantify the economic cost of cybercrime in Nigeria as other countries have been able to estimate the cost and use this statistics to combat the menace. This statistics if gathered will help push for sound policies bothering around cybercrime and socio-economic analysis in Nigeria.

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(Extracts from allafrica.com)

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Email: haastrupsteven@gmail.com