Judiciary admits skills gap in tackling cybercrime as Ugandan banks lose Shs24bn to fraud

Uganda's Judiciary has acknowledged gaps in the knowledge, training and coordination needed to handle increasingly sophisticated financial and cybercrime cases.

Deputy Chief Justice Moses Kazibwe Kawumi said on Wednesday, that digital financial crime was evolving faster than some of the systems traditionally used to investigate, prosecute and determine cases.

Speaking at the fourth Annual Financial Sector Anti-Fraud Forum 2026 in Kampala, Kazibwe said several financial crime cases remained unresolved across the investigative and judicial pipeline.

The DCJ noted that modern financial crimes present particular challenges because evidence is increasingly digital and can disappear quickly.

“Financial crime today rarely leaves a physical trail. It hides in cloud servers, in encrypted messages, in transaction logs that can vanish within days,” he said.

He said weaknesses could occur at different stages, from investigations and evidence gathering to prosecution and determination of cases.

“My own experience with case backlog taught me that delay is rarely caused by any one failure, it is the accumulation of many small gaps: in training, in evidence handling, in coordination between the officers who investigate, the prosecutors who charge, and the judges who ultimately decide,” Kazibwe said.

He added that digital financial crime was exposing existing weaknesses in a faster and more complicated environment.

At the event, it was revealed that the Ugandan financial institutions lost at least Shs24 billion to fraud and cybercrime in the first eight months of 2026.

The Uganda Bankers’ Association (UBA) said the financial sector recorded 6,533 cyber and fraud incidents between January and August 2026. 

Another Shs68 billion was classified as suspected exposure at risk. The figures were presented on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, during the fourth Annual Financial Sector Anti-Fraud Forum in Kampala.

UBA chairman and Housing Finance Bank Managing Director Michael Mugabi said fraud was no longer simply a matter of banks losing money. 

He warned that persistent attacks could damage public confidence in a financial system built largely on trust.

“Fraud not only hits our income and balance sheet accounts, it erodes capital, discourages investment and socio-economic development because it brings about reputational and credibility challenges for a sector that purely thrives on trust,” Mugabi said.

The forum, convened by UBA, the Payment Systems Providers Association and the Anti-Fraud Consortium, was held under the theme, “Safeguarding the Citizen: Beyond Infrastructure, Into Enforcement.” 

Mugabi identified peer-to-peer and wallet fraud, compromised digital channels, internal control and process abuse, investment schemes and suspicious financial flows among the persistent threats facing the industry.

He also cited gaps in customer awareness and security practices.

“Our control responses must therefore speak to these and address the high volumes of payment fraud as well as the high-value bank losses at the same time, including anticipating new fraud and cyber trends,” he said.

The second Anti-Fraud Forum in 2024 recommended stronger laws and enforcement, increased international cooperation and the establishment of a Financial Sector Anti-Fraud Consortium to coordinate the industry's response.

On his part, Deputy Chief Justice Kazibwe said the Judiciary, was open to developing a more specialised approach to financial and cybercrime cases.

Among the options under consideration are dedicated capacity and joint training of judicial officers, investigators and prosecutors through the Judicial Training Institute.

The Judiciary is also considering closer cooperation between institutions in the justice sector and the Financial Sector Anti-Fraud Consortium.

“Backlog is not fate. It yields to deliberate, structural change, better case management, clearer specialisation, closer coordination between the institutions that share responsibility for a case's journey from report to resolution,” he  said.

He said the Judiciary had received and was reviewing previous reports on Uganda's legal and regulatory framework for detecting, preventing and responding to fraud.

It has also received a recent assessment of cyber fraud trends and recommendations for improving the response.

Andre Wentzel, chief executive officer of the South African Banking Risk Information Centre (SABRIC), placed Uganda's challenges within a wider rise in technology-enabled crime across Africa.

He identified investment scams, employment scams and unexpected-money scams among the dominant scam categories in the African countries covered by the cited research.

Investment scams accounted for 34 per cent, employment scams 32 per cent and unexpected-money scams 31 per cent in the dataset presented.

He also identified transnational criminal networks, artificial intelligence, automation, digital and mobile channels and social engineering as emerging drivers of financial crime.

Organised criminal groups are increasingly operating across borders and using technology to scale fraud, complicating efforts by individual financial institutions and national authorities to respond.