Author
AbstractAs Nigeria's financial industry experiences rapid growth, driven by the widespread adoption of mobile phones and increased internet penetration, it also confronts a significant and escalating challenge of cybercrime. This study investigates the relationship between online banking adoption and the growth of cybercrime in Nigeria, with particular focus on phishing attacks and online scams. This study utilises panel data covering the period 2020-024. Primary data sources include the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) fraud reports, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) financial inclusion surveys, Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) telecommunications statistics, and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) cybercrime incident reports. Secondary data sources include academic studies, industry reports from cybersecurity firms, and international organisations' assessments of Nigeria's digital economy. High-profile security breaches could discourage adoption, while the perception of security might encourage it. To address this endogeneity concern, the instrumental variable (IV) estimation is used. The findings revealed a significant positive correlation between digital banking penetration and cybercrime incidents. The analysis reveals that phishing attacks tripled in frequency from 1,667 cases in 2022 to 4,457 cases in 2023, with financial losses increasing from ₦240.6 million to ₦551.2 million. Regression results confirm a strong positive link between digital banking and cybercrime. A 10% increase in adoption is associated with a 3.42% increase in cybercrime. Historical telecom infrastructure strongly predicts digital adoption (F=47.3). IV coefficient = 0.456 (p < 0.01), larger than OLS, indicating possible downward bias in OLS. The findings also suggest that while digital transformation in banking has enhanced financial inclusion, it has inadvertently created new vulnerabilities exploited by cybercriminals. The causal nature of the relationship also suggests that policy interventions should focus on breaking the link between digitalisation and crime opportunities, rather than simply slowing digital adoption. The study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence of the cybercrime-digitalisation nexus in emerging economies and offers policy recommendations for sustainable digital financial ecosystem development.
Suggested Citation
Download full text from publisher
To our knowledge, this item is not available for
download. To find whether it is available, there are three
options:
1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
2. Check on the provider's
web page
whether it is in fact available.
3. Perform a
for a similarly titled item that would be
available.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05215758. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.