INTERPOL Operation Serengeti III: 1,462 arrests, $105 million recovered across Africa

Between 29 June and 31 August 2026, police in 21 countries ran one coordinated operation against cyber-enabled fraud across Africa. According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, the operation, called Serengeti III and coordinated by INTERPOL, led to 1,462 arrests and the recovery of more than USD 105 million in illicit funds.

The scale of what was dismantled is laid out in the numbers. Investigators disrupted 10,909 malicious networks and identified 65,929 victims. Losses linked to the criminal activity are put at more than USD 385 million. The operation targeted cyber-enabled fraud, online scams, business email compromise, ransomware and digital extortion.

What made the arrests possible

The sequence matters here. Investigators did not start by chasing complaints. They started with intelligence on suspicious domains, IP addresses and command-and-control infrastructure, gathered before the operation began. That let agencies act on specific targets from day one, rather than build cases from scratch during the eight-week window.

That intelligence did not come from police alone. Private-sector partners fed in technical analysis and operational expertise that helped map the criminal networks and identify who to target. The named partners include Group-IB, Kaspersky, Fortinet, Team Cymru, Uppsala Security, Atlas Group, Meta, GASA itself, and Zimbabwe's Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority. A telecoms regulator sitting alongside cybersecurity firms and a social media platform is itself part of what changed: the people who see the infrastructure of a scam and the people who see its victims were working from the same intelligence at the same time.

Why recovery is the part that reaches victims

Arrests disrupt a network. Recovered money is what a victim actually gets back. More than USD 105 million was recovered during the operation, against more than USD 385 million in losses linked to the criminal activity. That gap shows recovery is partial, but it is not nothing, and it is the step that turns an enforcement statistic into something a person out of pocket can feel.

The operation also showed that the networks it disrupted were not confined to Africa. Some of the schemes reached victims on other continents, which is why GASA frames this as a cross-border problem that no single country, company or regulator can handle alone. INTERPOL's African Cyber Threat Assessment Report 2026 warns that artificial intelligence is making this kind of cybercrime easier to scale, and that losses continue to rise.

Several investigations opened during Serengeti III are still active. GASA says further results are expected.