A 20-year-old's cryptocurrency wallet moved more than $122.5 million in just 10 months as part of a scheme to launder money stolen from romance-scam victims, Interpol said, in one of the standout cases from a sweeping global anti-fraud operation.
5,800+ arrests, USD 293 million intercepted across 97 countries
The results of Operation First Light 2026 highlight the global scale of social engineering fraud and associated money laundering.
The arrests were part of Operation First Light 2026, a coordinated crackdown that ran from mid-January to the end of April across 97 countries and territories. In total, authorities made 5,811 arrests, intercepted $293 million in illicit assets and identified more than 142,000 victims, Interpol said, while blocking 31,014 bank accounts and analyzing more than 152,000 cases. Some of the freezes relied on I-GRIP, an Interpol stop-payment mechanism that can halt flows of both traditional money and virtual assets.
Criminal syndicates "exploit human psychology to manipulate their targets," said Tomonobu Kaya, who heads Interpol's financial crime and anti-corruption center, adding that no country can stay safe unless all of them push back together.
Pig butchering and crypto launderingRomance scams, often called "pig butchering," typically start with a stranger building a relationship over weeks or months before steering the target toward a fake crypto investment. Once victims' money is on-chain, launderers move fast to break the trail, hopping funds across blockchains and swapping between tokens so investigators lose the thread.
First Light, funded by China's Ministry of Public Security and backed by regional policing bodies, is only one campaign in a widening effort, with Interpol's tally of more than 142,000 victims in a single four-month window illustrating the scale of the challenge facing law enforcement.
