Global Interpol sting against cybercrime: 45,000 IP addresses offline

The international police organization Interpol has conducted a major operation involving 72 countries, including Switzerland, France, and Greece. Germany was not involved. A total of 45,000 IP addresses and servers were taken offline, and 94 people were arrested, with investigations ongoing against 110 others.

According to Interpol, the operation, codenamed Synergia III, ran from July 18 last year to January 31 this year, as Interpol announced now. Through targeted data analysis and cross-border cooperation, the respective local police authorities were able to take action and carry out house searches, among other things. Numerous servers and other hardware were seized.

Lovescamming, fraud websites, and credit card fraud

Interpol explicitly names three investigation successes in Bangladesh, China, and Togo. In China's special administrative region of Macau, more than 33,000 phishing and fraud websites were identified, which posed as online casinos or official websites of banks, authorities, and payment service providers. The fraudsters' goal is to get victims to deposit money into their accounts via the fraudulent websites or to disclose their personal data and credit card details.

In Bangladesh, the police arrested 40 suspects and seized 134 electronic devices. Both are related to various forms of fraud, including loan fraud, job offer scams, identity theft, and credit card fraud.

In Togo, the police busted a fraud ring in a residential area and apprehended ten suspects. Some of them were reportedly responsible for technical tasks such as unauthorized access to social media accounts, while others carried out social engineering scams like romance scams and sextortion. On the African continent, a large-scale raid against cybercrime with hundreds of arrests had already taken place in February.

(nen)