58 arrests, and the price list behind the scams you keep getting

Fifty-eight arrests. Two hundred and sixty-three suspects identified. Twenty-two countries across six continents. INTERPOL published the results of Operation Jackal IV today, and although the police work ran from November 2025 to June this year, the detail worth reading is what these networks were actually selling - because it has almost certainly been in your inbox.

The target was West African organised crime, chiefly the Black Axe syndicate, and the trade is romance scams, fake cryptocurrency and investment platforms, and business email compromise. South African police made 39 of the arrests, seized $2.67 million and blocked 257 bank accounts, working against a group that deliberately picked English-speaking retirees. Romanian officers dismantled an investment-scam call centre, arrested eleven people and took EUR 330,000 in cash and cryptocurrency, six properties and a shelf of luxury watches; investigators estimate around EUR 143 million passed through it. In Italy, one suspect had moved EUR 845,000 across 560 separate transactions.

Argentina's part is the one to notice. Seventeen arrests, and 196 suspects tied to a Crime-as-a-Service operation that supplied other gangs with web domains and money laundering. That is the answer to why a fraudulent investment site looks so plausible - nobody builds them by hand, they're rented, the way those phantom bank websites all came off one template. INTERPOL also flagged sextortion of minors in the same networks: contact over social media, trust built up, explicit images obtained, then a demand for money to stop them reaching the victim's friends list.

Fifty-eight arrests against operations that size is a dent, not a cure, and the domains keep getting rented. If a teenager shares the family PC, Tendvane's Privacy and accounts check shows how each account on the machine is signed in and what it can reach - a duller five minutes than the conversation you'd have afterwards.