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A crackdown connected cybercrime coordinated by Interpol has led to the arrests of 260 radical crossed 14 African countries suspected successful online romance and extortion scams, the organisation announced Friday (September 26, 2025).
The cognition took spot successful July and August and focused connected scams successful which perpetrators physique online romanticist relationships to extract wealth from targets oregon blackmail them with explicit images, Interpol said.
Altogether the scams targeted much than 1,400 victims who mislaid astir $2.8 million, the planetary constabulary organisation said.
“Cybercrime units crossed Africa are reporting a crisp emergence successful digital-enabled crimes specified arsenic extortion and romance scams,” Cyril Gout, acting enforcement manager of constabulary services astatine Interpol, said successful the statement.
“The maturation of online platforms has opened caller opportunities for transgression networks to exploit victims, causing some fiscal nonaccomplishment and intelligence harm,” helium added.
Interpol says Ghanaian authorities arrested 68 suspects successful romance and sextortion scams. They are accused of utilizing fake identities to instrumentality victims into paying fake shipment fees and secretly recorded explicit videos for blackmail.
In Senegal, constabulary arrested 22 suspects who allegedly posed arsenic celebrities connected societal media and dating platforms to scam implicit 100 radical retired of astir $34,000, Interpol said.
The organisation besides said authorities successful Ivory Coast arrested 24 suspects accused of utilizing fake profiles to get and blackmail victims with intimate images.
Interpol, which has 196 subordinate countries, is the world's largest planetary constabulary web to combat planetary crime. Headquartered successful Lyon, France, it works to assistance nationalist constabulary forces pass with each different and way suspects and criminals successful areas similar counterterrorism, fiscal crime, kid pornography, cybercrime and organised crime.
In caller years it has grappled with caller challenges including a increasing caseload of cybercrime and kid enactment abuse, and expanding divisions among its subordinate countries.
