A large-scale police investigation into social engineering fraud involving law enforcement agencies from 76 countries has resulted in the seizure of $50 million in illicit funds, and arrest of 2,000 alleged fraudsters. In the course of the investigation, the police identified 3,000 different suspects, and froze some 4,000 bank accounts.
The operation, codenamed First Light 2022, lasted two months, between March and May 2022, and was focused on social engineering schemes involving telephone deception, romance scams, e-mail deception, and related financial crimes.
As part of the operation, police raided 1,770 locations worldwide, mostly call centers suspected of being related to telecommunications or scamming fraud.
In a press release Interpol said that among the arrested was a Chinese national wanted in connection with a Ponzi scheme who allegedly defrauded nearly 24,000 victims out of EUR 34 million. Another case highlighted by Interpol involved a kidnapping scam seeking a EUR 1.5 million ransom from the victim’s parents.
Earlier this month, Europol announced the takedown of the infrastructure of FluBot, a piece of SMS-based Android malware, designed to steal passwords, online banking details and other sensitive information from infected devices. The Dutch police said they disconnected ten thousand victims from the FluBot network and prevented over 6.5 million spam SMS from reaching prospective victims.