Law enforcement authorities in seven African international locations have arrested 306 suspects and confiscated 1,842 gadgets as a part of a world operation codenamed Red Card that occurred between November 2024 and February 2025.
The coordinated effort “goals to disrupt and dismantle cross-border prison networks which trigger vital hurt to people and companies,” INTERPOL stated, including it centered on focused cell banking, funding, and messaging app scams.
The cyber-enabled scams concerned greater than 5,000 victims. The international locations that participated within the operation embrace Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Togo, and Zambia.
“The success of Operation Red Card demonstrates the ability 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 serious belongings and gadgets, in addition to the arrest of key suspects, sends a powerful message to cybercriminals that their actions won’t go unpunished.”
As a part of the crackdown, Nigerian police arrested 130 folks, together with 113 overseas nationals, for his or her alleged involvement in on-line on line casino and funding fraud. Some of the people working in rip-off facilities are stated to be victims of human trafficking, and compelled into finishing up unlawful schemes.
Another notable operation concerned the arrest of 40 folks by South African authorities and the seizure of greater than 1,000 SIM playing cards that have been used for large-scale SMS phishing assaults.
Elsewhere, Zambian officers apprehended 14 suspected members of a prison syndicate that hacked into victims’ telephones and gained unauthorized entry to their banking apps by putting in malware by way of SMS phishing hyperlinks. Group-IB stated the malware enabled unhealthy 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 utility that focused customers in African international locations together with data on associated infrastructure.
Also arrested have been 45 members of a prison 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 gadgets seized.
“Their techniques included posing as telecommunications workers and claiming pretend ‘jackpot’ wins to extract delicate data and achieve entry to victims’ cell banking accounts,” INTERPOL stated. “Another methodology concerned impersonating an injured member of the family to ask kin for monetary help in the direction of hospital payments.”
News of the arrests comes weeks after INTERPOL introduced a partnership with the African Development Bank Group to higher fight corruption, monetary crime, cyber-enabled fraud, and cash laundering within the area.
Earlier this month, the Royal Thai Police and the Singapore Police Force arrested a person chargeable for greater than 90 situations of knowledge leaks worldwide, together with 65 within the Asia-Pacific (APAC) area. The menace actor first emerged publicly on December 4, 2020, working below the aliases ALTDOS, mystic251, DESORDEN, GHOSTR, and 0mid16B.
The assaults concerned the usage of SQL injection instruments, comparable to SQLmap, to realize entry to delicate knowledge, adopted by deploying Cobalt Strike Beacons to keep up persistent management over compromised hosts.
“He focused internet-facing Windows servers, particularly looking for databases that contained private data,” Group-IB stated in a report detailing the menace actor’s modus operandi. “After compromising these servers, he exfiltrated the sufferer’s knowledge and, in some instances, encrypted it on the compromised servers.”
The finish purpose of those assaults was monetary achieve, pressurizing victims into both paying a ransom or risking public publicity of their confidential knowledge. Several entities from Bangladesh, Canada, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, Thailand, and the U.S. had their knowledge leaked on darkish net boards like CryptBB, RaidForums, and BreachForums.
“One persistent element throughout all 4 of his aliases was his methodology of publishing stolen knowledge screenshots,” Group-IB researchers famous. “Regardless of his rebranding, he persistently uploaded photos instantly from the identical machine, revealing a key operational fingerprint.”
The growth additionally follows the arrest of almost a dozen Chinese nationals who’ve been accused of perpetrating a brand new kind of tap-to-pay fraud that entails utilizing stolen bank card data to buy present playing cards and launder funds.
