INTERPOL’s fourth iteration of Operation Jackal, an eight-month effort targeting West African organized crime networks including groups tied to Black Axe, resulted in 58 arrests and identified 263 suspects across 22 countries on six continents, the agency announced this week.

The operation, running from November 2025 through June 2026, traced illicit financial flows tied to romance scams, investment fraud, cryptocurrency schemes, business email compromise, and call-center investment fraud, along with sextortion targeting minors as young as 14. South Africa alone seized roughly $2.67 million and blocked 257 bank accounts; Romania seized around $379,000 in cash and cryptocurrency plus six properties, tied to an estimated $143 million laundered globally through the network under investigation there. “Operation Jackal IV demonstrates the power of international cooperation,” said Tomonobu Kaya, director of INTERPOL’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre. “By following illicit financial flows across borders, we are attacking the very lifeblood of organized crime and making it increasingly difficult for criminal networks to profit from their activities.”

For security leaders, the operational detail worth noting is what got disrupted alongside the arrests: crime-as-a-service infrastructure supplying website domains and money-laundering support to the network, with 196 individuals identified in Argentina for that role alone. That mirrors a pattern this publication has tracked all year in the fraud infrastructure that underpins scam campaigns, from templated phishing kits sold as a service to malvertising campaigns built on shared tooling. The scams themselves are numerous and disposable; the infrastructure and money-laundering layer beneath them is comparatively scarce and reusable, which is exactly why law enforcement operations increasingly target that layer rather than chasing individual scam campaigns one at a time. Security teams building fraud-detection programs should take the same lesson: mapping shared infrastructure across seemingly unrelated fraud attempts finds the choke point that shutting down one campaign never does.

Source: INTERPOL