The operation ran from June 29 to August 31, coordinated by INTERPOL, with law enforcement agencies from 21 countries — 20 of them in Africa, plus the United States — targeting cyber-enabled fraud, ransomware, business email compromise, online scams and digital extortion.
Announcing the results on Thursday, INTERPOL said 1,462 suspects were arrested and 10,909 malicious networks disrupted across the participating countries. Investigators identified 65,929 victims targeted by the networks, and financial investigations linked the criminal activity to losses exceeding $385 million, with more than $105 million in illicit funds recovered.
In Nigeria, authorities made two arrests highlighted by INTERPOL. One suspect was arrested over a large-scale phishing and business email compromise operation that harvested software credentials and collected approximately 2.1 million email addresses; investigators also recovered a luxury vehicle believed to have been bought with criminal proceeds. In a separate case, another suspect was arrested over an international investment fraud scheme promoted through messaging apps, in which financial tracing showed more than $2.4 million in suspected proceeds, much of it moved through cryptocurrency. The 1,462 arrests are the total across all 21 participating countries, not in Nigeria alone.
The largest single tally came in Uganda, where authorities dismantled two transnational fraud rings and arrested 365 foreign nationals linked to online investment and pension fraud. The rings ran call centres using scripted pitches and fake trading platforms to target pensioners in Asia. In Angola, investigators shut down two illegal cryptocurrency mining centres, arrested nine suspects and seized more than 2,000 mining devices and six illegal power transformation stations, with the electrical equipment alone valued at over $1 million.
Elsewhere, authorities disrupted a malicious mobile lending application scheme in Tanzania, broke up a vehicle import fraud network in Gabon, and arrested 30 suspects in the Republic of Congo.
Before the operation began, INTERPOL provided investigators with intelligence on suspicious domains, IP addresses and command-and-control infrastructure used by the criminal networks. Private-sector partners, including Group-IB, Kaspersky, Fortinet, Team Cymru and Meta, supported the work by helping to identify targets and map the networks. "Cybercrime networks operate without regard for borders, exploiting technology to target victims on an unprecedented scale," INTERPOL's Director of Cybercrime, Neal Jetton, said.
Operation Serengeti III is the third round of the crackdown, following the first Operation Serengeti in 2024, which produced 1,006 arrests, and Serengeti 2.0 in 2025, which produced 1,209 arrests. INTERPOL has not named the suspects arrested in this round, and investigations are continuing.
