US$30m Lost to Mobile Fraud as Zimbabwe Fights Back with AI

The government has declared a new digital battlefield on Zimbabwean soil, warning that the nation is losing more than thirty million United States dollars annually to artificial intelligence-powered mobile money fraud as criminals arm themselves with deepfake voices, cloned identities, and adaptive malware against the country’s rapidly expanding digital economy.

Addressing the 2026 Cyber Fraud and AI Summit at Montclair Resort in Nyanga on Wednesday, the Minister of Information Communication Technology, Postal and Courier Services, Honourable Tatenda Mavetera, told an audience of senior government officials, banking executives, mobile network operators, and technology leaders that traditional fraud defences had become obsolete.

POTRAZ Director General Dr G. K. Machengete confers with ICT Minister Hon. T. Mavetera during the 2026 Cyber Fraud and AI Summit at Montclair Resort in Nyanga on Tuesday.

“You cannot fight an intelligent machine with a manual rulebook,” the Minister said. “You must fight AI with AI.”

The summit, held under the theme “AI vs AI – The New Battlefield for Cyber Fraud,” heard that mobile money fraud alone now exceeds thirty million United States dollars per year, with phishing and social engineering attacks surging by more than forty percent in recent years.

According to ministry figures presented to the gathering, cyber fraud nationally now costs millions of dollars annually, figures that the Minister described as representing not abstract statistics but real threats to livelihoods, national confidence, and economic stability.

Globally, cybercrime is projected to cost over ten trillion United States dollars annually, with Africa losing more than four billion dollars each year.

Minister Mavetera declared that within the next twelve months, the government would launch the Zimbabwe AI Cyber Shield, a national programme that will deploy a centralised artificial intelligence-driven fraud detection platform for the financial services and telecommunications sectors.

The programme will also train ten thousand Zimbabwean cybersecurity professionals in artificial intelligence defence techniques and establish a legal framework for the ethical use of artificial intelligence in cyber defence.

The Minister revealed that the National Cybersecurity Strategy had been finalised and was awaiting Cabinet approval, while the National Security Operations Centre was now eighty-five percent complete and would serve as the nation’s nerve centre for real-time threat detection, leveraging artificial intelligence to counter artificial intelligence-driven attacks.

Turning to legislative action, Minister Mavetera instructed his ministry to propose amendments to the Cyber and Data Protection Act, Chapter twelve of seven, to specifically criminalise the creation or distribution of artificial intelligence tools designed for fraud, including deepfake generators, voice cloning software for impersonation, and artificial intelligence-powered password crackers.

The amendments would also criminalise the use of artificial intelligence to generate synthetic identities for financial crime.

“We will not allow Zimbabwe to become a safe haven for AI cybercriminals,” the Minister warned.

The Minister announced the establishment of a Joint Artificial Intelligence Cyber Defence Unit under a public-private partnership, which would co-locate the national Computer Emergency Response Team with artificial intelligence laboratories from industry and academia.

He said the unit would operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, sharing real-time threat intelligence on artificial intelligence-generated fraud patterns.

“In the war of AI vs AI, speed is the ultimate weapon,” Mavetera said.

“The first AI to detect a threat wins. The second AI – the defender – must be faster.”

Addressing financial institutions and telecommunications companies directly, Minister Mavetera ordered banks, mobile network operators including Econet, NetOne, and Telecel, and payment platforms such as EcoCash and OneMoney to invest in adversarial artificial intelligence systems capable of anticipating and countering fraudster artificial intelligence in real time.

She directed them to deploy behavioural biometrics, including analysis of how a user types, swipes, or holds their phone, as an additional layer of artificial intelligence-powered authentication.

Minister Mavetera,  also ordered them to share anonymised fraud data with a national cyber observatory.

“A bank that guards its fraud data like a state secret is helping the criminal, not the customer,” the Minister said.

For ordinary citizens and small businesses, the government will launch a national campaign entitled “Verify Before You Trust,” which will teach Zimbabweans simple techniques including reverse image search, voice confirmation through a second channel, and suspicious link checking using free artificial intelligence tools.

The government will also provide subsidised artificial intelligence-powered fraud alert applications for small to medium enterprises and rural mobile money agents serving platforms such as EcoCash and OneMoney.

On the regional front, Minister Mavetera said he would table a proposal at the next Southern African Development Community ICT Ministers’ meeting for a SADC Artificial Intelligence Cyber Fraud Protocol, which would enable mutual legal assistance in tracing cross-border artificial intelligence-generated fraud.

She also called for partnership with INTERPOL and the African Union to create an early warning system for artificial intelligence-driven phishing campaigns targeting African nations.

The Minister called on academia and researchers to establish an artificial intelligence Red Teaming initiative to ethically hack the nation’s own digital infrastructure to find weaknesses before criminals could exploit them.

She also urged them to develop local datasets of Zimbabwe-specific fraud patterns, including mobile money scams, fake SIM swaps, and voice note impersonations, to train defensive artificial intelligence on Zimbabwean data rather than relying solely on global datasets.

Minister Mavetera also announced that a national certification programme on artificial intelligence-enabled fraud investigation, digital forensics, and handling of artificial intelligence-generated evidence would be launched for police officers, prosecutors, and magistrates.

“You cannot arrest what you do not understand,” the Minister said.

“You cannot convict what you cannot prove.”

The announcements follow President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s official launch of Zimbabwe’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy for the years twenty-twenty-six to twenty-thirty on the thirteenth of March twenty-twenty-six, a milestone that the Minister said had accelerated the adoption and integration of artificial intelligence across sectors while simultaneously expanding the attack surface for cyber fraud.

Minister Mavetera quoted the late scientist and futurist Stephen Hawking, who once said that success in creating artificial intelligence would be the biggest event in human history but might also be the last unless humanity learned to avoid the risks. “We are not afraid of AI,” the Minister said.

“We will use it. We will regulate it. We will defend with it. Let this summit mark the moment Zimbabwe decided to fight AI with AI – and win. Let it be said of this generation of Zimbabweans: we did not wait for disaster. We built the shield before the spear struck.”