INTERPOL fraud sweep exposes $122.5 million crypto wallet

INTERPOL said on Thursday that a 97-country fraud sweep led to 5,811 arrests and the interception of $293 million in illicit assets, while investigators in Thailand uncovered a crypto-laundering network that used cross-chain token swaps to obscure proceeds from romance scams.

The operation, called First Light, ran from Jan. 15 to April 30 and targeted social-engineering fraud, including business email compromise, sextortion, romance, impersonation and investment scams. More than 142,000 victims were identified during the campaign, alongside 31,014 blocked bank accounts, 23,715 solved cases and 15,606 suspects identified, according to INTERPOL.

In a statement, Tomonobu Kaya, director of INTERPOL’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre, said social-engineering scams “continue to pose a significant threat to our society” and that criminal syndicates exploit human psychology to manipulate targets. He said the agency was supporting member countries with a coordinated strategy to tackle cyber-enabled financial crimes and the money laundering that fuels them. The official release said authorities also used INTERPOL’s Global Rapid Intervention of Payments, or I-GRIP, to block illicit fiat and virtual-asset transfers.

The crypto detail came from Thailand, where police made two arrests after uncovering a laundering scheme that moved romance-scam proceeds through multiple cryptocurrencies via cross-chain token swaps. According to The Block, investigators said one 20-year-old suspect’s digital wallet processed more than $122.5 million in 10 months.

That wallet figure matters because it gives the laundering problem a size that is easy to miss when enforcement agencies describe payment interdiction in broad terms. Cross-chain swaps can move funds between blockchains quickly enough to complicate tracing, but the Thai case suggests the tactic is now part of routine fraud infrastructure rather than a niche tool reserved for sophisticated cybercrime rings.

Elsewhere, INTERPOL said Singapore and Oman used I-GRIP to block a $6.6 million transfer linked to a business email compromise case, while authorities in Macao stopped a victim from sending nearly $372,000 to fraudsters posing as public officials. In Eswatini, police arrested 82 people and dismantled an illegal gambling, money-laundering and impersonation network that used a fake Brazilian police station to trick victims into handing over funds for supposed safekeeping.

Why this matters

For regulators and police agencies, the significance is less the headline arrest count than the operational breadth. The sweep spanned fraud, laundering, blocked transfers and scam-centre takedowns across multiple jurisdictions, and it treated virtual assets as a live enforcement channel rather than a specialist add-on.

For crypto markets, the takeaway is that laundering pathways are being described by mainstream law-enforcement bodies in the same breath as bank-account freezes and payment interdictions. That makes cross-chain activity a compliance issue for exchanges, analytics firms and banks dealing with virtual-asset flows, especially when the flow starts with old-fashioned social-engineering scams.

Still, the broader lesson is that fraud enforcement has become more networked than episodic. INTERPOL said the evidence haul from Operation First Light will continue to feed follow-on cases, which means the real impact may show up over months as authorities connect wallets, bank accounts and scam centres across borders.