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Kenya’s Court of Appeal struck down criminal penalties for publishing “false information” online, a decision that weakens a cybercrime law rights groups say has been used to arrest bloggers, journalists, and social media users since 2018. In a ruling delivered in Nairobi on Friday, a three-judge bench invalidated Sections 22 and 23 of the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, saying the provisions were vague and infringed constitutional protections for freedom of expression and media freedom. The Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE), Article 19 Eastern Africa, the Kenya Union of Journalists, and other civil society groups filed the case in the Court of Appeal. “This is not just a win for content creators or journalists. It is a win for every Kenyan who uses the internet to speak truth to power,” said Kennedy Kachwanya, chairperson of BAKE. The judges, Patrick Kiage, Aggrey Muchelule, and Weldon Korir, said the offences relating to “false publications” and “false information” failed the constitutional test of clarity and risked criminalising ordinary online speech. The court found the provisions were so broad that they could capture people who share information without knowing it is inaccurate. Criminalising “falsity,” the judges said, could suppress satire, opinion, and journalistic errors. Kenya passed the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act in 2018 to address online fraud, hacking, and digital harassment. From the start, media groups and digital rights activists challenged the law, arguing that some sections created a tool for policing online speech. Several bloggers and social media users have been investigated or arrested under the law’s “false information” provisions since it came into force, drawing criticism from press freedom groups. The High Court upheld most of the law in 2020, prompting the appeal that led to Friday’s ruling. Despite striking out the false information offences, the Court of Appeal left most of the statute intact. Judges upheld provisions allowing investigators to seek court warrants to search and seize digital data, issue production orders requiring service providers to release subscriber information, and conduct real-time data collection during investigations. The court also retained offences covering child sexual exploitation material and cybersquatting, which criminalise registering domain names in bad faith using another person’s trademark or identity. Digital rights groups welcomed the ruling but said broader concerns remain about the law’s surveillance powers. “The fake news offences have been weaponized time and time again to target journalists, content creators, members of the Public and anyone who dares to speak truth to power,” said Mercy Mutemi, BAKE’s lawyer. The petitioners said they were reviewing the judgment and might pursue further legal action on sections they argue still threaten privacy and civil liberties online.
Read MoreAfrican fintech startups spent the last decade building systems to stop fake users from opening accounts. But the real threat may already be inside their platforms. In a single month in 2025, one fraud syndicate used 100 stolen faces to launch over 160,000 verification attacks across Africa’s fintech platforms, according to a new report from Smile ID, a Lagos-based identity verification company. The report, titled “2026 Digital Identity Fraud in Africa Report,” analysed over 200 million identity checks conducted across 35 African countries and 37 industries last year, drawn from a cumulative dataset exceeding 400 million checks processed since 2019, according to Smile ID. The report highlights a structural shift in how fraud works in Africa’s digital economy: attacks now concentrate on logins, account recovery, and other authentication flows, making them five times more common than fraud at account registration. Rather than create fake identities to open new accounts, fraudsters prefer to hijack existing, verified ones, exposing a blind spot in systems that were built on the assumption that the main risk sits at signup, not months later inside live accounts. “The most consequential fraud attacks today are targeted account takeovers (ATOs)—not fake IDs or isolated spoofs, but coordinated operations that compromise the capture pipeline, reuse real identities at scale, and exploit moments after approval when controls are lighter through highly scalable AI-powered tooling,” Smile ID noted in the report. Over the past decade, the percentage of adults in Africa owning a financial account rose from 34% to nearly 60%, creating more than 200 million new accounts across the continent, according to Smile ID. The verification systems that secured most of those accounts were designed for that one moment of onboarding. The attackers have moved on. Authentication is now the primary battleground For years, identity verification in African fintech worked like a checkpoint: users submitted an ID document and a selfie, and if the images matched, they were granted access. That model worked when fraud attempts were rare and mostly involved fake documents or low-quality spoofing. By 2025, that environment had changed dramatically. Attackers now focus on the moments that unlock value inside financial platforms—login attempts, password resets, device changes, and withdrawal requests—where security checks are often lighter than during onboarding. These flows rely on controls like SMS one-time passwords (OTPs), email links, and security questions, which can be bypassed through SIM swaps, social engineering, or insider assistance. The overall share of verifications rejected by Smile ID for suspected fraud declined from 25% in 2024 to 22% in 2025. But the decline is misleading. The number of fraud attempts kept rising as verification volumes grew. The nature of the attacks changed. Petty onboarding fraud declined while attackers concentrated resources on sophisticated takeovers of high-value accounts. Historical rejection rates tell the same story. The share of all traffic blocked for suspected fraud rose steadily from 17% in 2020 to a peak of 29% in 2023, before falling to 22% last year. Fraud networks are reusing the same identities at scale One of the report’s most striking findings is how concentrated modern fraud attacks have become. A fraud syndicate used 100 facial identities to conduct large-scale break-in attempts, signalling that the same biometric data is being reused repeatedly across multiple fintech platforms. Some identities appeared over 12,000 times in verification attempts; another was used in more than 1,000 account registrations within 30 minutes. Smile Secure, Smile ID’s biometric deduplication tool, caught 126,000 duplicate fraud attempts in 2025, up from 52,000 in 2024 and 21,000 in 2023. That sixfold increase over two years reflects not just rising attack volumes but growing sophistication: syndicates now operate supply chains for identity assets, ageing accounts through dormancy before activating them for fraud or money laundering. These patterns confirm that fraud has deeply embedded itself in coordinated, industrialised tactics. Organised networks and syndicates are running automated campaigns against fintech platforms. Attackers build repositories of stolen identities, facial images, and documents, then deploy them across multiple financial apps simultaneously. AI is collapsing the economics of fraud The report also showed that Generative AI has altered the cost structure of identity fraud in Africa. High-quality synthetic documents, deepfake imagery, and automated biometric manipulation are no longer expensive or rare. The marginal cost of each fraud attempt now approaches zero, according to the report, which means attackers can afford to test systems continuously until they find vulnerabilities. In 2025, AI-generated manipulation drove 69% of confirmed biometric fraud cases, including synthetic faces, deepfakes, and face swaps, according to the report. Another 20% were tied to metadata from known fraud networks, while 11% were simple screen or replay attacks. Smile ID saw a 250% jump in high‑fidelity document forgeries, especially portrait tweaks where attackers swap or insert synthetic faces into otherwise normal-looking IDs, while older screen‑based tricks declined. Fraud is getting harder to spot and more technical. Attackers are targeting the infrastructure itself Beyond identity reuse, attackers are skillfully manipulating the systems used for identity verification rather than the images those systems evaluate. Smile ID saw more than 100,000 injection-style attacks every month in 2025, where fraudsters used software‑simulated phones and fake camera feeds to sneak prerecorded or AI‑generated selfies past checks. Its systems flagged 480,000 attempts that appeared to use these fake capture setups. Nearly 90% of suspicious verifications were stopped through its mobile SDKs in 2025, up from 15% in 2023 and 65% in 2024, showing how basic API checks that only see the final selfie or document often miss attacks where the capture process itself has been tampered with. West Africa is seeing the pressure most clearly The shift toward account‑takeover fraud is most visible in West Africa’s digital banks. Potential fraud attempts in retail banking rose about 50% in 2025, driven mainly by activity during logins and account recovery rather than at onboarding, and attacks grew faster than overall verification traffic, pointing to new tactics rather than simple growth. Impersonation makes up roughly two‑thirds of attempted fraud in the region, split between spoofing (33%) and no‑face‑match failures
Read MoreGoogle has added Yoruba and Hausa to the list of languages supported by its AI-powered Search features, AI Overviews, and AI Mode, bringing two of Nigeria’s most spoken primary languages into its search environment. The update allows users to ask questions and receive AI-generated summaries in their native tongues directly within Google Search. The expansion brings Google’s AI Search language support in Africa to 13 languages, including Kiswahili, Wolof, Afrikaans, Kinyarwanda, Akan, Oromoo, Amharic, Somali, Hausa, Afaan, Setswana, isiZulu, Sesotho, and Yoruba. Google said the languages were selected based on search activity across the continent to make its AI-powered search tools accessible to more users. “With the advanced multimodal and reasoning capabilities of our custom version of Gemini in Search, we’ve made huge strides in language understanding, so our most advanced AI search capabilities are locally relevant and useful in each new language we support,” said Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade, Communications & Public Affairs manager for Google West Africa. Nigerians speak over 500 languages. While English is the official language, Hausa and Yoruba are among the most widely used, with a combined 48.7% of speakers across the country. Expanding AI search capabilities into those languages reduces the friction of interacting with complex digital tools, particularly for users who are more comfortable searching or speaking in their mother tongue. Native speakers could type or narrate any question in any supported language on AI Mode within the Search experience in the Google App. This update comes weeks after Google launched WAXAL, an open-source speech database developed in collaboration with African universities. The database was designed to support the development of speech recognition systems and voice assistants. These efforts are part of Google’s broader strategy to localise artificial intelligence tools for African users. “This is about ensuring Nigerians can converse with Search in their mother tongues, making information more helpful for everyone,” said Kola-Ogunlade. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d’Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe
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