Regulation enforcement authorities in seven African nations have arrested 306 suspects and confiscated 1,842 units as a part of a world operation codenamed Purple Card that befell between November 2024 and February 2025.
The coordinated effort “goals to disrupt and dismantle cross-border prison networks which trigger vital hurt to people and companies,” INTERPOL mentioned, including it centered on focused cellular banking, funding, and messaging app scams.
The cyber-enabled scams concerned greater than 5,000 victims. The nations that participated within the operation embrace Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Togo, and Zambia.
“The success of Operation Purple Card demonstrates the facility of worldwide cooperation in combating cybercrime, which is aware of no borders and may have devastating results on people and communities,” Neal Jetton, INTERPOL’s Director of the Cybercrime Directorate, mentioned.
“The restoration of great property and units, in addition to the arrest of key suspects, sends a powerful message to cybercriminals that their actions is not going to go unpunished.”
As a part of the crackdown, Nigerian police arrested 130 folks, together with 113 international nationals, for his or her alleged involvement in on-line on line casino and funding fraud. A few of the people working in rip-off facilities are mentioned to be victims of human trafficking, and compelled into finishing up unlawful schemes.
One other notable operation concerned the arrest of 40 folks by South African authorities and the seizure of greater than 1,000 SIM playing cards that had been used for large-scale SMS phishing assaults.
Elsewhere, Zambian officers apprehended 14 suspected members of a prison syndicate that hacked into victims’ telephones and gained unauthorized entry to their banking apps by putting in malware through SMS phishing hyperlinks. Group-IB mentioned the malware enabled dangerous actors to additionally acquire management over messaging purposes, permitting them to propagate the fraudulent hyperlink to others.
Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky famous that it shared with INTERPOL its evaluation of a malicious Android software that focused customers in African nations together with data on associated infrastructure.
Additionally arrested had been 45 members of a prison community by Rwandan authorities for his or her involvement in social engineering scams that defrauded victims of greater than $305,000 in 2024. Of the stolen funds, $103,043 has been recovered and 292 units seized.
“Their techniques included posing as telecommunications staff and claiming pretend ‘jackpot’ wins to extract delicate data and acquire entry to victims’ cellular banking accounts,” INTERPOL mentioned. “One other technique concerned impersonating an injured member of the family to ask family members for monetary help in direction of hospital payments.”
Information of the arrests comes weeks after INTERPOL introduced a partnership with the African Improvement Financial institution Group to higher fight corruption, monetary crime, cyber-enabled fraud, and cash laundering within the area.
Earlier this month, the Royal Thai Police and the Singapore Police Pressure arrested a person accountable for greater than 90 cases of knowledge leaks worldwide, together with 65 within the Asia-Pacific (APAC) area. The risk actor first emerged publicly on December 4, 2020, working beneath the aliases ALTDOS, mystic251, DESORDEN, GHOSTR, and 0mid16B.
The assaults concerned the usage of SQL injection instruments, reminiscent of SQLmap, to achieve entry to delicate information, adopted by deploying Cobalt Strike Beacons to keep up persistent management over compromised hosts.
“He focused internet-facing Home windows servers, particularly looking for databases that contained private data,” Group-IB mentioned in a report detailing the risk actor’s modus operandi. “After compromising these servers, he exfiltrated the sufferer’s information and, in some instances, encrypted it on the compromised servers.”
The top purpose of those assaults was monetary acquire, pressurizing victims into both paying a ransom or risking public publicity of their confidential information. A number of entities from Bangladesh, Canada, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, Thailand, and the U.S. had their information leaked on darkish net boards like CryptBB, RaidForums, and BreachForums.
“One persistent element throughout all 4 of his aliases was his technique of publishing stolen information screenshots,” Group-IB researchers famous. “No matter his rebranding, he constantly uploaded photos instantly from the identical system, revealing a key operational fingerprint.”
The event additionally follows the arrest of almost a dozen Chinese language nationals who’ve been accused of perpetrating a brand new sort of tap-to-pay fraud that includes utilizing stolen bank card data to buy reward playing cards and launder funds.
