---
title: "esentry Report Flags ₦1B Undetected Fraud in West Africa"
description: "esentry says over ₦1B in fraud went undetected in West Africa in H1 2026, with major fintech and banking incidents raising monitoring concerns."
canonical_url: "https://liners.com/news/esentry-undetected-fraud-west-africa-h1-2026"
markdown_url: "https://liners.com/news/esentry-undetected-fraud-west-africa-h1-2026.md"
type: "article"
language: "en"
published_at: "2026-10-13T07:00:54.699Z"
updated_at: "2026-10-13T07:00:54.751Z"
---

# esentry Report Flags ₦1B Undetected Fraud in West Africa

esentry says over ₦1B in fraud went undetected in West Africa in H1 2026, with major fintech and banking incidents raising monitoring concerns.

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## Content

## In Short
- esentry says more than ₦1 billion in fraud went undetected by automated security systems across West Africa in H1 2026.
- The firm investigated three major incidents in Nigeria across fintech, payments, and core banking.
- None of the incidents triggered a single automated security alert.

## What Happened
A new esentry report says over ₦1 billion in fraud went undetected in West Africa in the first half of 2026. The findings are in its Eye of Horus H1 2026 Threat Landscape Report.

esentry said three major fraud incidents it investigated in Nigeria were completed without triggering any security alerts. The cases cut across fintech, payment systems, and core banking platforms.

The report says the fraud was detected only after the transactions had already happened. It points to routine audits, customer support tickets, and settlement warnings as the channels that surfaced the incidents.

esentry argues the issue was not mainly “zero-day” software bugs, meaning unknown flaws that vendors have not patched yet. Instead, attackers used legitimate credentials, meaning real usernames and passwords, and abused trusted access.

The report also flags gaps in security logging. Logging is the record a system keeps of activity, like a trail of receipts. If logs are missing or incomplete, fraud monitoring tools may not see suspicious behaviour in time.

## Why It Matters
For banks and fintechs, this report is a warning that automated monitoring alone can miss fraud, especially when criminals look like normal users. It also suggests that faster response times for detected threats do not help if the system fails to detect the threat in the first place.

esentry said Nigeria-based organisations faced an average of more than 4,700 cyberattacks per week in H1 2026. It also reported 281,500 Nigerian accounts were newly breached in Q1 2026.

The report adds that Ghana is seeing similar pressure. Ghana’s national Computer Emergency Response Team recorded more than 3,500 confirmed cybersecurity incidents in Q1 2026, and reported losses from online investment scams in the first half of the year.

For operators, the practical takeaway is better visibility across tools. That means stronger identity controls, more complete logs, and human review that can spot misuse of “trusted” access before it becomes a financial loss.

## Sources and products

- [Nairametrics](https://nairametrics.com/2026/10/13/over-n1-billion-in-fraud-went-undetected-in-west-africa-in-h1-2026-report)

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