Cybersecurity Act, Unlawful Access
Cybersecurity Act, 2020 (Act 1038), s. 94 (Unlawful Access)
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
In force since 29 December 2020.
A computer misuse rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 4 September 2026.
What it requires
- Do not, without lawful authority, retrieve a person's subscriber information or intercept traffic data or content data.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Criminal exposure note
Unlawful access under section 94 carries a fine of not less than two thousand five hundred penalty units and not more than fifteen thousand penalty units, or imprisonment of not less than two years and not more than five years, or both.
Penalty structure
Section 94 sets a fine of not less than two thousand five hundred penalty units and not more than fifteen thousand penalty units. One penalty unit equals twelve Ghana cedis under the Fines (Penalty Units) Act, 2000 (Act 572), as recorded by the Ghana Revenue Authority, making the ceiling one hundred eighty thousand Ghana cedis.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- 4 September 2026
- Currency
- GHS
- Fixed cap
- 15,000
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
Cyber Security Authority; prosecuted before the High Court
What it reaches
Obligation class
Access restriction, Security
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Section 94 punishes a person who, without lawful authority, retrieves subscriber information or intercepts traffic data or content data. This offence is narrower than the Electronic Transactions Act's general unauthorized-access offences: it binds a person dealing in communications data held by or passing through a service provider, rather than a general web crawler collecting data from public pages it does not own.
The Act also imposes retention and cooperation duties on a service provider, and creates a licensing regime for cybersecurity service providers, enforced by the Cyber Security Authority.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_web
Read the law
Cybersecurity Act, 2020 (Act 1038), full text (csdsafrica.org)