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

Researchers led by Michele M. Easter of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, working with colleagues at the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, examined death by distribution prosecutions across all of North Carolina between 2013 and 2024. Their analysis, published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice, drew on court records spanning the state’s 42 prosecutorial districts and 100 counties. The goal was to map how often these charges were filed over time and to identify the district- and county-level characteristics associated with prosecution. The findings point to what the authors call geographic arbitrariness in the application of a law born from the overdose crisis.

The study documented 557 death by distribution court charges statewide over the study period. The trajectory was steep. Although North Carolina first passed a death by distribution statute in 2017, the vast majority of charges, 88 percent, were filed after 2020, when a new version of the legislation took effect. That expansion coincided with the worsening of the fentanyl era, during which both overdose deaths and DD-charging rose together across the state. Cases moved at varying speeds: an examination of case-level court data showed a mean of 155 days between the overdose offense date and the filing of charges, with a median of 121 days and a striking range from zero to 897 days.

A crucial technical detail of the statute shapes who can be swept into its net. Sixty percent of the charges were filed under the least serious form of death by distribution, a felony class that does not require proof of a drug sale, an intent to distribute, or any prior criminal history. In practice, this category could apply to virtually any instance of drug sharing that ends in a fatal overdose, including situations where two people used the same substance together and one did not survive. Because this broadest form dominated the caseload, most of the researchers’ statistical analysis focused on it, and its reach raises the stakes of understanding how charging decisions are actually made.

The core empirical question was whether prosecutions track the underlying public health crisis. They do not, at least not cleanly. Correlations between the number of overdose deaths in a district or county and the number of death by distribution charges were weak. If the law functioned as a direct, proportionate response to overdose mortality, one would expect jurisdictions with more deaths to file more charges. Instead, the pattern was scattered and uneven, with some places generating charges at rates far out of proportion to their overdose burden. One district, comprising Stanly and Montgomery counties, and nine individual counties, including Martin, Carteret, Stanly, Graham, Washington, Polk, Chatham, Northampton, and Pamlico, emerged as high outliers in charges per 1,000 overdose deaths.

To understand what did drive charging, the team built regression models relating death by distribution charging rates to district and county characteristics. The most consistent predictors were population size, racial composition, and poverty. Among the 42 prosecutorial districts, the relationship between racial composition and death by distribution cases was curvilinear and bell-shaped, meaning charges peaked in districts with intermediate racial compositions rather than rising linearly. Among the 100 counties, greater poverty was associated with fewer death by distribution charges after adjusting for population, a counterintuitive finding that complicates any simple narrative about who bears the brunt of these prosecutions.

The practical implication is stark: two people who engage in essentially identical conduct, sharing drugs with a friend who then dies, face radically different legal risks depending on which side of a county or district line they happen to live on. This mirrors a pattern documented in the capital punishment literature, where researchers have shown for decades that the decision to seek the death penalty varies enormously across counties within the same state, an earlier body of work that inspired the title of the North Carolina study. In the context of overdose, however, the stakes extend beyond sentencing disparities to the integrity of public health policy itself.

That is because a substantial body of research suggests death by distribution laws may actively undermine evidence-based responses to substance use disorder. Public health approaches to the overdose crisis depend on people who use drugs calling for help during an emergency, carrying naloxone, and being honest with medical providers and harm reduction workers about what they took. Studies of Good Samaritan overdose laws show that fear of legal consequences suppresses 911-calling behavior among overdose witnesses, and research with incarcerated people has described a deterrence paradox in which removing one supplier from a drug market simply creates a vacancy for the next. Prosecutors and legal scholars have also documented that these statutes often rest on mistaken assumptions about how illicit drug markets work, since many people charged never intended to sell anything and shared doses among equals.

The North Carolina study is careful to frame its findings as a starting point rather than a verdict. The authors note that their work invites conversations about potential alternatives for those who seek justice for people who die from overdose, ranging from restorative justice practices to public health-centered responses that treat overdose as a preventable medical outcome rather than a homicide. They also emphasize that crisis-driven legislation, passed in moments of acute grief and public alarm, often produces laws whose real-world application diverges sharply from their stated aims, a dynamic observed in other domains of American policy. The uneven geography of death by distribution charging documented here offers a statewide, data-driven illustration of that divergence.

What the study ultimately delivers is a map of legal exposure that no one designed and no one defends. A law intended to target predatory suppliers is, in its most commonly used form, reaching people whose culpability may amount to little more than shared drug use, and the likelihood of being charged at all depends on local prosecutorial culture, community demographics, and economic conditions. As more states adopt similar statutes amid the ongoing fentanyl crisis, the North Carolina data provide a template for the questions they should expect: not only whether these laws deter overdose deaths, but whether the decision to transform a tragedy into a homicide case can be justified when it is, in effect, decided by geography.

Subject of Research: Death by distribution prosecutions for fatal drug overdoses across North Carolina

Article Title: Geographic Arbitrariness? Examining Death by Distribution Prosecutions Statewide in North Carolina

Article References: Easter, M. M., Grunberg, R. L., Stenger, M., Bass-Patel, L., Swanson, J. W., & Lee, A. (2026). Geographic Arbitrariness? Examining Death by Distribution Prosecutions Statewide in North Carolina. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-026-09935-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12103-026-09935-x

Keywords: death by distribution, drug-induced homicide, overdose, opioid crisis, fentanyl, prosecution, North Carolina, substance use disorder, geographic disparity, criminal justice, public health, harm reduction