Technology 3 min read By Arthur Ellington
Interpol arrests 1,462 suspects in Serengeti III cybercrime operation across 21 countries
Interpol's Serengeti III operation, one of Africa's largest cybercrime crackdowns, led to 1,462 arrests, the dismantling of 10,909 malicious networks and the recovery of $105 million in illicit funds.
Interpol has announced that its Serengeti III operation, described as one of the largest cybercrime operations in Africa, led to 1,462 arrests across 21 countries. Authorities also dismantled 10,909 malicious networks and recovered illicit funds worth $105 million. The results were set out in a statement published by the international police organisation on 22 October.
The operation ran from 29 June to 31 August and targeted a range of online crimes, including fraud, ransomware, business email compromise, online scams and digital extortion. Investigators identified 65,929 victims, and the financial losses linked to the activity of the networks exceed $385 million. The scale of these figures shows how widely such criminal activity has spread across the continent and beyond, affecting individuals, companies and public bodies alike.
Neal Jetton, director of Interpol's cybercrime unit, stressed the importance of international cooperation in tackling offences that routinely cross borders. Criminal networks operate across national frontiers, so no single police force can trace them alone. Private-sector partners contributed technical analysis and supplied suspect domains and IP addresses, information that helped investigators follow the infrastructure behind the attacks. Interpol, which is headquartered in Lyon, coordinated the work between national authorities taking part in the operation.
Interpol also attributes 55 per cent of reported cybercrime in Africa to the use of artificial intelligence, a finding that points to the way criminals are adapting new tools to make their schemes more convincing and harder to detect. The organisation has indicated that investigations are continuing, with the aim of identifying further suspects and tracing the assets obtained through the criminal activity. Recovered funds and the suspects already in custody form the basis of that next phase of work.
The Serengeti operation is the latest in a series of coordinated efforts by Interpol against cybercrime, and the Serengeti III round shows the same model in practice: national police, private-sector analysts and the central coordinating body working on shared data. For victims, the identification of more than 65,000 people offers a route to recovering losses, while for the networks themselves the dismantling of nearly 11,000 operations removes the tools they relied on. The organisation has not said how the remaining suspects will be pursued, but its statement makes clear that the work is far from finished.
Source: economedia.ro
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