Legislation enforcement authorities in seven African nations have arrested 306 suspects and confiscated 1,842 units as a part of a global operation codenamed Purple Card that occurred between November 2024 and February 2025.
The coordinated effort “goals to disrupt and dismantle cross-border felony networks which trigger vital hurt to people and companies,” INTERPOL stated, including it targeted on focused cell banking, funding, and messaging app scams.
The cyber-enabled scams concerned greater than 5,000 victims. The nations that participated within the operation embody Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Togo, and Zambia.
“The success of Operation Purple Card demonstrates the facility of worldwide cooperation in combating cybercrime, which is aware of no borders and may have devastating results on people and communities,” Neal Jetton, INTERPOL’s Director of the Cybercrime Directorate, stated.
“The restoration of great property and units, in addition to the arrest of key suspects, sends a robust message to cybercriminals that their actions is not going to go unpunished.”
As a part of the crackdown, Nigerian police arrested 130 individuals, together with 113 overseas nationals, for his or her alleged involvement in on-line on line casino and funding fraud. Among the people working in rip-off facilities are stated to be victims of human trafficking, and compelled into finishing up unlawful schemes.
One other notable operation concerned the arrest of 40 individuals by South African authorities and the seizure of greater than 1,000 SIM playing cards that had been used for large-scale SMS phishing assaults.
Elsewhere, Zambian officers apprehended 14 suspected members of a felony syndicate that hacked into victims’ telephones and gained unauthorized entry to their banking apps by putting in malware through SMS phishing hyperlinks. Group-IB stated the malware enabled dangerous actors to additionally achieve management over messaging purposes, permitting them to propagate the fraudulent hyperlink to others.
Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky famous that it shared with INTERPOL its evaluation of a malicious Android software that focused customers in African nations together with info on associated infrastructure.
Additionally arrested had been 45 members of a felony community by Rwandan authorities for his or her involvement in social engineering scams that defrauded victims of greater than $305,000 in 2024. Of the stolen funds, $103,043 has been recovered and 292 units seized.
“Their ways included posing as telecommunications staff and claiming faux ‘jackpot’ wins to extract delicate info and achieve entry to victims’ cell banking accounts,” INTERPOL stated. “One other technique concerned impersonating an injured member of the family to ask kin for monetary help in direction of hospital payments.”
Information of the arrests comes weeks after INTERPOL introduced a partnership with the African Growth Financial institution Group to raised fight corruption, monetary crime, cyber-enabled fraud, and cash laundering within the area.
Earlier this month, the Royal Thai Police and the Singapore Police Pressure arrested a person chargeable for greater than 90 situations of knowledge leaks worldwide, together with 65 within the Asia-Pacific (APAC) area. The risk actor first emerged publicly on December 4, 2020, working beneath the aliases ALTDOS, mystic251, DESORDEN, GHOSTR, and 0mid16B.
The assaults concerned the usage of SQL injection instruments, akin to SQLmap, to realize entry to delicate information, adopted by deploying Cobalt Strike Beacons to take care of persistent management over compromised hosts.
“He focused internet-facing Home windows servers, particularly looking for databases that contained private info,” Group-IB stated in a report detailing the risk actor’s modus operandi. “After compromising these servers, he exfiltrated the sufferer’s information and, in some circumstances, encrypted it on the compromised servers.”
The tip aim of those assaults was monetary achieve, pressurizing victims into both paying a ransom or risking public publicity of their confidential information. A number of entities from Bangladesh, Canada, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, Thailand, and the U.S. had their information leaked on darkish internet boards like CryptBB, RaidForums, and BreachForums.
“One persistent element throughout all 4 of his aliases was his technique of publishing stolen information screenshots,” Group-IB researchers famous. “No matter his rebranding, he constantly uploaded photos straight from the identical machine, revealing a key operational fingerprint.”
The event additionally follows the arrest of practically a dozen Chinese language nationals who’ve been accused of perpetrating a brand new kind of tap-to-pay fraud that entails utilizing stolen bank card info to buy present playing cards and launder funds.