The International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) has successfully intercepted a whopping $83 million that belonged to victims of online financial fraud/crime from transfers into the accounts of the perpetrators as per 83mgatlanbleepingcomputer.
40+ officers, who specialize in combating cybercrime in the Asia Pacific Region, participated in the HAECHI-I Operation coordinated by Interpol that took more than six months. From September 2020-March 2021, officers focused on combating five kinds of financial crimes online. These included romance-based scams, investment related frauds, money laundering that is linked to illegal gaming online, voice phishing, and sextortion online.
The stolen money could be blocked from being transferred into the accounts of the scammers after several jointly coordinated operations and several months of gathering intelligence on the operations of the attackers. All throughout the Operation HAECHI-I, agents at Interpol started more than 1,400 investigations that targeted cybercrime throughout the entire Asia Pacific region, including China, Cambodia, the Philippines, Laos, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore. 892 cases have been solved successfully with the others being investigated at the moment.
585 arrests were done globally while 1,600+ bank accounts of such financial crime perpetrators were also frozen. The Director of Organized and Emerging Crime at Interpol, Ilana de Wild, stated that digital fraudsters often try to tap into the internet’s borderless traits through attacking victims in other nations or even dispatching their illegal money abroad, while adding that the results of the operation only show that digital financial fraud/crime is a global phenomenon and such criminals can only be tackled through global cooperation mechanisms.
Interpol also gave valuable advice and guidance last year to victims of such digital and financial scams with regard to instantly acting to block and intercept stolen money before it reached the accounts of these scammers. In January 2021, all 194 member states were warned by Interpol with regard to such criminals targeting users of dating apps and attempting to mislead them into investments through trading apps which are fake. Three members of a dreaded cybercrime gang that has attacked more than 50,000 entities were arrested sometime earlier after another Interpol investigation and operation called Falcon.