Operation Serengeti III: 1,462 arrests and over USD 105 million recovered in Africa-wide cybercrime crackdown
Interpol announced on 22 October 2026 the results of Operation Serengeti III, one of Africa's largest coordinated cybercrime crackdowns. Across two months of enforcement, police in 21 countries arrested 1,462 suspects, disrupted 10,909 malicious networks and recovered more than USD 105 million in illicit funds, according to the announcement.
The operation ran from 29 June to 31 August 2026. Investigators from 20 African countries took part, joined by the United States: Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Interpol says financial investigations tied the targeted activity to victim losses exceeding USD 385 million, and that 65,929 victims were identified, as The Record notes.How the operation worked
Rather than a string of unconnected national raids, Serengeti III was built on shared intelligence. Interpol supplied participating units with pre-enforcement data on suspicious domains, IP addresses and command-and-control servers, while private-sector partners filled in the picture: Group-IB contributed threat intelligence on phishing kits, botnets and malicious infrastructure, alongside Kaspersky, Fortinet, Team Cymru, Trend AI, Uppsala Security, Cybercrime Atlas and Meta, as The Hacker News reports. The effort was co-funded by GLACY-e, a joint European Union and Council of Europe initiative. Team Cymru's Jacomo Piccolini put the logic plainly: criminals cannot operate without infrastructure — they have to build it, connect it and maintain it, and those activities create opportunities to find them.- In Uganda, two transnational fraud rings were dismantled and 365 foreign nationals arrested over online investment and pension fraud aimed at victims in Asia, run through call centres with scripted pitches and fake trading platforms.
- In Angola, two illegal cryptocurrency mining centres were shut down: nine arrests, more than 2,000 mining devices seized, along with six illegal power transformation stations whose electrical infrastructure was valued at over USD 1 million.
- In Nigeria, one suspect was arrested in a phishing and business email compromise case that harvested software credentials and around 2.1 million email addresses; a luxury car suspected to have been bought with the proceeds was also recovered.
- A separate Nigerian arrest traced more than USD 2.4 million from an investment fraud scheme run through messaging apps, with the money largely laundered via cryptocurrency.
- In the Republic of Congo, 30 suspects were arrested; Tanzania saw a malicious mobile loan-app scheme dismantled, and Gabon a network defrauding users over vehicle imports on social media.
The scale behind the numbers
The headline arrest figure only partly captures the operation's scope. The 65,929 identified victims and the USD 385 million in linked losses point to fraud at industrial scale — much of it not technically sophisticated, but relentless: fake trading platforms, investment pitches, phishing pages and loan apps. Interpol's own African Cyber Threat Assessment Report 2026, published alongside the results, warns that AI is increasingly used to craft convincing messages and scale social engineering, according to Security Affairs.Cybercrime networks operate without regard for borders, exploiting technology to target victims on an unprecedented scale.The words belong to Neal Jetton, Interpol's director of cybercrime. He added that the operation reinforces a clear message: while cybercrime is increasingly borderless, international cooperation remains one of the most effective tools for disrupting criminal networks, recovering criminal assets and protecting communities from digital harm.