Private security using WhatsApp and AI to fight crime in South Africa

Community Wolf, a platform operating exclusively on WhatsApp, allows South African residents to anonymously report suspicious activity or crime that they witness in the country.

According to Community Wolf co-founder Nick Mills, this data is collected, added to a geolocated map, and shared with private security partners and Community Policing Forums to facilitate responses.

Moreover, the platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help predict, model, and understand suspicious activity and criminal activity across the country.

“We started Community Wolf with the vision to cater for all South Africans and allow them to participate in public safety,” Mills said in an interview with Cape Talk.

“What we mean by that is allowing everyone from the leafy suburbs of Constantia, all the way to townships in Kayamandi, to participate so they can make an impact in their community from a public safety perspective.”

Described as a community Facebook group on steroids, Community Wolf uses WhatsApp’s Community feature to enable users to report and view broadcasts.

“We’re on WhatsApp only. That was important for us for a few reasons, but one of them is that that’s where South Africa is,” said Mills.

“If you want to meet the whole nation, you meet them on WhatsApp because that’s where the nation is.”

He explained that users can report suspicious activity in specific areas and communities, such as where their family works and goes to school.

“If you report something, that will get broadcast to everyone else who is watching that area,” he added.

“We collect data anonymously. We add it to a map to start this geolocated crime data set, which doesn’t exist yet in South Africa, and we pipe that to our private security partners through our enterprise platform.

Mills said the ultimate goal is to create a data set to help predict, model, and understand suspicious and criminal activity nationwide.

Building the platform

MyBroadband interviewed Mills, who founded the Community Wolf platform with Michael Houghton, in March 2025.

Mills and Houghton first met in High School in Grahamstown, before going their separate ways when they entered the tertiary education system.

Mills completed his studies in Cape Town, while Houghton went to Edinburgh, Scotland.

Mills said he had been approached while working for a solar business because of how the company integrated WhatsApp into its platform.

After brainstorming, he realised the potential for a platform to process WhatsApp inputs and provide real-time data for private security firms and law enforcement.

With Houghton working in AI at the time, Mills approached him about participating in the project as it required a large language model integration to enable users to engage on the platform.

While working in the solar space, he realised it was challenging to convince people to download a new app, which was one of the reasons the team chose WhatsApp and opted against slapping “a skin over ChatGPT”.

Community Wolf was thus born in October 2024.

“The first feature we came out of the gate with was: ‘report any suspicious activity that you see, describe it as best you can with a voice note, text or even an image, and drop a pin,” said Mills.

He said the relevant parties are notified when a user reports any suspicious activity, adding that the data is encrypted using the SHA-256 hashing algorithm.

This ensures that sensitive information remains encrypted until it reaches the designated receivers.

It also enables Community Wolf to access the information if authorities determine that a complaint has been made to divert resources while a crime is committed elsewhere.