Interpol: Operation Serengeti III Led to 1,462 Arrests and $105 Million Recovered Across Africa

Police in 21 countries arrested 1,462 suspected cybercriminals and disrupted 10,909 malicious networks during Operation Serengeti III, Interpol said Thursday, Oct. 22. The operation ran from June 29 to Aug. 31, 2026.

Investigators recovered more than $105 million in illicit funds. They identified 65,929 victims and tied the criminal activity to losses exceeding $385 million.

Who took part

Twenty of the 21 participating countries are African: 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. The 21st is the United States.

Private companies fed intelligence into the effort. Interpol and the firms named Team Cymru, Group-IB, Kaspersky and Fortinet. Team Cymru supplied data on suspicious domains, IP addresses and command-and-control servers, the machines criminals use to direct infected computers. Group-IB said it provided data on phishing kits, botnets and other malicious resources hosted in Africa or used against targets there.

"Criminals cannot operate without infrastructure. They have to build it, connect it and maintain it, and those activities create opportunities to find them," said Jacomo Piccolini, Team Cymru's vice president of global data partnerships.

What police found

The biggest single haul of arrests came in Uganda. Police dismantled two transnational fraud rings and arrested 365 foreign nationals. Interpol said the groups ran call centers with scripted pitches, fake trading platforms and fraudulent websites to push investment and pension scams. Their victims were in Asia.

In Angola, authorities shut down two illegal cryptocurrency mining centers and arrested nine suspects. They seized more than 2,000 mining devices and six unauthorized power transformation stations. The electrical equipment alone was valued at over $1 million.

Nigeria produced two cases. One suspect was arrested for a large-scale phishing and business email compromise operation that harvested software credentials and collected about 2.1 million email addresses. Investigators also recovered a luxury car they believe was bought with the proceeds. A second Nigerian investigation, into an investment fraud pushed through messaging apps, led to an arrest and traced more than $2.4 million in suspected proceeds, much of it moved through cryptocurrency.

Elsewhere, authorities dismantled a malicious mobile loan app scheme in Tanzania and disrupted a vehicle import fraud network in Gabon that ran on social media. In the Republic of Congo, 30 suspects were arrested in a cybercrime case.

Third round, bigger numbers

This is the third Serengeti operation. The first ran from September to October 2024 across 19 countries. It produced 1,006 arrests and about $44 million recovered. Serengeti 2.0 ran from June to August 2025 and produced 1,209 arrests and $97.4 million in seized funds.

Arrests have risen with each round: 1,006, then 1,209, then 1,462. Reported recovered funds were about $44 million in the first round, $97.4 million in the second and more than $105 million in this one.

One comparison does not line up. The first operation reported 134,089 malicious infrastructures neutralized, against 11,432 in the second round and 10,909 networks in this one. Interpol's wording differs between rounds, so those figures are not a clean like-for-like count.

"Cybercrime networks operate without regard for borders, exploiting technology to target victims on an unprecedented scale," said Neal Jetton, Interpol's director of cybercrime. He added that international cooperation "remains one of the most effective tools for disrupting criminal networks, recovering criminal assets and protecting communities from digital harm."

Interpol also warned that artificial intelligence is increasingly being exploited by cybercriminals.

A separate FBI push

The FBI has run its own campaign in West Africa under a program called Operation Blackout, aimed at foreign scam compounds. FBI Director Kash Patel said the effort led to 28 arrests in Ghana and Nigeria, seizures of more than 350 devices, and $11 million in potentially freezable funds. He said it also freed more than 100 trafficked workers.

Meta said it took down more than 3.7 million Facebook and Instagram accounts allegedly linked to fraud in coordination with the FBI, the Justice Department, the U.K. National Crime Agency and the Homeland Security Task Force. That action is distinct from Serengeti III, though both target scam infrastructure that reaches American victims.

What the numbers leave open

An arrest is not a conviction. Interpol's announcement counts suspects arrested, not defendants charged or convicted, and each country's courts will decide the outcomes. Interpol has not published a breakdown of how many of the 1,462 cases are headed to prosecution.

The $385 million loss figure is also an estimate from financial investigators. Interpol has not said how much of the $105 million recovered will be returned to the 65,929 victims it identified. In the Uganda cases, the victims were in Asia, so any restitution would have to cross borders again.