Anti-Cybercrime Operation Across Africa Arrest 14 Suspects

On Friday, INTERPOL stated that 14 suspected cybercriminals had been arrested as a result of a concerted law enforcement operation across 25 African countries.

Together with AFRIPOL, we were able to perform an exercise that led us to the identification of 20,674 cyber networks that were responsible for over $40 million in losses.

The agency announced in April 2023 that it has begun a four-month operation called Africa Cyber Surge II with the goal of locating crooks and damaged infrastructure.

Three individuals were arrested in Cameroon for their suspected roles in an online art forgery scheme totaling $850,000. A second person wanted for fraud against a Gambian victim was apprehended in Nigeria.

Two money mules involved in scams conducted via instant chat were also detained.

There were 3,786 C2 servers, 14,134 victim IP addresses associated with data stealer infections, 1,415 phishing links and domains, 939 scam IP addresses, and more than 400 malicious URLs, IPs, and botnets across the cyber networks. Additionally, two dark web sites were shut down.

One of the private sector partners, Group-IB, claimed responsibility for tracking down malicious domains, URLs, and server IP addresses.

The Africa Cyber Surge operation, begun in July 2022, aimed to tackle cybercrime and identify compromised infrastructure on the continent; this current development follows on its heels.

In the first round, 11 people were arrested and over 200,000 pieces of harmful infrastructure, including hacking tools and cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) services, were taken down from the dark web market.