The study, authored by legal scholar Boris Awa, examines how Law No. 2010/012 of 21 December 2010 on Cybersecurity and Cybercrime, known as the Cyber-law, has fared in practice. Adopted to fill a legal vacuum created by rapid technological change, the law criminalizes a comprehensive range of digital offences modeled on the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime. These include unauthorized interception of communication networks, disruption of information systems, fraudulent access to networks, misuse of personal data, publication of intimate images, and child pornography. The statute was meant to guarantee access to justice in an era when the internet had become the primary vector for criminal activity. Yet the study’s central finding is that, from a litany of judicial decisions examined, the courts continue to apply ordinary penal code offences when determining cybercrime charges.

The scale of the problem is considerable. Crypto scams alone account for more than 54 percent of cybercrime in Cameroon, with damages estimated at over two million US dollars in 2023, and no comprehensive data exists on the full scale of the various cybercrimes committed in the country. INTERPOL’s African Cyberthreat Assessment Report identifies online scams, digital extortion, business email compromise, botnets and ransomware as the driving forces behind cyberthreats across the continent. Against this backdrop, the gap between the specialized law on the books and the law applied in courtrooms has real consequences for victims, defendants and the credibility of the justice system itself.

The research rests on a qualitative, doctrinal methodology grounded in primary and secondary sources, including legislation, constitutional provisions and case law obtained from three trial courts: the Court of First Instance Bonanjo in the economic capital Douala, the Court of First Instance Bamenda in the North West Region, and the Buea Court of First Instance in the South West Region. This selection allowed a comparative view across Cameroon’s French-speaking civil law and English-speaking common law traditions, a dual legal heritage enshrined in Article 68 of the Constitution. The author acknowledges that judgments from seven other regions could not be examined due to financial and logistical constraints, so the analysis does not purport to be exhaustive, but the selected courts carry significant caseloads and offer a credible window into contemporary judicial practice.

The case studies are revealing. In the 2024 Tresor case, an employee of a company partnering with MTN Cameroon used his professional credentials to reset a customer’s mobile money PIN and withdrew 3,200,000 CFA francs, roughly 3,100 US dollars, from the complainant’s account. The court convicted him of simple theft under section 318 of the Penal Code and imposed a five-month prison term, suspended for one year. The study argues that the proper charge was hacking under section 65 of the Cyber-law, which punishes unauthorized access to an electronic communication network. Similarly, in the 2021 Joly case, an administrator of a WhatsApp group used for currency trading was convicted of theft by false pretence after failing to deliver currency worth 399,000 CFA francs, receiving a three-year sentence suspended for three years, when the study contends the sanction should have been sourced from the electronic commerce legislation. In a third case, an advance fee fraud conducted entirely by telephone and Western Union transfers was again prosecuted as ordinary false pretence rather than under the Cyber-law.

The consequences of this reliance on ordinary law are structural, not merely cosmetic. Under the Penal Code, judges enjoy broad discretion to grant mitigating circumstances and suspended sentences, and in practice most cybercriminals either serve no imprisonment or receive markedly lighter penalties. The Cyber-law, by contrast, expressly forbids suspended sentences for the offences it defines, and the study argues that mitigating circumstances cannot apply because they are not formally provided for in the statute, in line with the principle of legality. Moreover, key Penal Code concepts translate poorly to the digital realm: aggravated theft requires material elements such as force, weapons, breaking in, climbing in or the use of a false key or motor vehicle, none of which corresponds to the mechanics of a cyber intrusion. The result is that offences which the Cyber-law treats as serious crimes, some punishable by more than twenty years of imprisonment, are reduced to misdemeanours or simple offences under ordinary law, a leniency the study warns may itself encourage the culture of committing cybercrime.

Evidence is the other half of the problem. The Criminal Procedure Code of 2005 admits electronic proof only tacitly and narrowly, through provisions on wiretapping and electronic listening devices that the Court of Appeal in the Tchoffo Jonas case interpreted as investigative tools for capturing live communications, not as a framework for authenticating stored digital data. The Cyber-law contains its own procedural rules, empowering criminal investigation officers and sworn officials of the National Agency for Information and Communication Technologies, ANTIC, to conduct searches and seizures of electronic data. But in practice, most judicial police officers lack the training to collect electronic evidence themselves, forcing prosecutors to depend on ANTIC for expert analysis. Because ANTIC is centralized in Yaoundé while Cameroon has 282 courts of first instance and 39 high courts, requests pile up, trials stall, and suspects are released on bail or acquitted for insufficient evidence, as occurred in several of the cases studied.

The study also documents a second, smaller current of jurisprudence in which courts do engage with the specialized law. The Buea Court of First Instance held in one case that a cybercrime is consummated so long as the medium used is electronic communication, whether a website, a text message or a phone call, and advised that doubtful emails be examined by a forensic IT expert. In a 2019 Bamenda ruling, Justice Bikelle Theresia set out the elements the prosecution must establish under section 65 of the Cyber-law for unauthorized access, and the accused was convicted. Yet such decisions remain scarce. The study points to a paucity of cybercrime cases overall, attributing it to trivialization by investigators and prosecutors, settlements between parties, and even alleged connivance with so-called scammers, whose foreign victims rarely file complaints or follow up because of the cost involved.

Why does the judiciary keep reaching for the old codes? The study identifies a web of causes: a shortage of local legal scholarship, with only three publications having analyzed the role of judicial actors in cybercrime prosecution; a weak law reporting system, with a single reporter covering English-speaking Cameroon and none for the Francophone regions; and, above all, inadequate training. Most Cameroonian law faculties offer information and communication technology law only as a final-year module, if at all, and criminal law courses are often taught without any reference to cyber-enabled offending. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Daniel Mekobe Sone, acknowledged the problem in his 2023 address at the solemn reopening of the court, decrying the non-application of cybercrime provisions, the peculiarities of electronic evidence and general public ignorance. The problem is not unique to Cameroon, with similar dynamics documented in Nigeria and South Africa, though the study notes that Cameroon’s over-reliance on its ordinary Penal Code sets it apart.

The prescriptions are concrete. The study recommends that ANTIC, in partnership with the Cameroon Bar Association, mount massive sensitization and training campaigns for lawyers, investigators, prosecutors, court registrars, bailiffs and judges, covering the qualification of offences and the handling of electronic evidence. It calls for revising the Cyber-law itself to address emerging threats such as deepfakes, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, and for removing the criminalization of libel, which comparable jurisdictions have struck down as an affront to free speech. It urges Cameroon to ratify the Budapest Convention and the 2024 United Nations Convention against Cybercrime to ease cross-border cooperation, to sanction judicial corruption, to accelerate law reporting, and to stimulate scholarly output. Without these reforms, the study warns, the gap between the digital crimes being committed and the analogue justice being dispensed will only widen, eroding trust in the electronic networks on which the country’s future depends.

Subject of Research: Judicial prosecution of cybercrime and the application of specialized cyber law versus ordinary penal law in Cameroon

Article Title: Rethinking cybercrime prosecution in Cameroon

Article References: Awa, B. (2026). Rethinking cybercrime prosecution in Cameroon. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 215. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00582-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00582-5

Keywords: cybercrime, Cameroon, cyber law, prosecution, electronic evidence, Penal Code, judiciary, ANTIC, mobile money fraud, Budapest Convention, legal reform, digital forensics