Leading Tech Companies Join Global Law Enforcement in Major Crackdown on West African Scam Networks

Today, Meta, Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Starlink, Adobe, and other leading tech companies announced the results of a major joint operation with law enforcement to disrupt criminal scam networks based in West African nations, including Nigeria and Ghana. Hosted by the National Crime Agency (NCA) in London in partnership with the US Department of Justice, the FBI, and several US federal agencies, the operation marked the latest and largest instance of tech companies coming together with law enforcement around the world to share information, take down sophisticated criminals, and help protect people from online scams.

This is the first joint disruption to broadly target criminal scam networks in the West Africa region. Scam centers based in Nigeria, Ghana, and other nations in the region are generally more decentralized and less industrial than those in southeast Asia. Criminals are continually seeking new havens where they believe they can operate with impunity, and it’s essential that law enforcement, industry, and government work together to disrupt these criminals wherever they may try to organize and operate.

Beginning Tuesday, October 6, the NCA — in coordination with the FBI, the US Department of Justice, Homeland Security Investigations and other US agencies — convened Meta and other leading tech companies at NCA headquarters in London along with Ghanaian law enforcement, Nigerian law enforcement, and other law enforcement partners from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and India. The disruption kicked off with remarks from law enforcement leaders that included a call to action from Jeanine Pirro, US Attorney for the District of Columbia and leader of the US Department of Justice Scam Center Strike Force. Other participating US agencies included the US Secret Service, US Department of Treasury, and the Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF).

Over the following days, teams shared actionable intelligence to connect information across platforms, jurisdictions, and financial systems in order to identify and target criminal networks at multiple points along the fraud attack chain. Their activity ranged from scammer recruitment and infrastructure to victim identification and the movement of funds, with a majority targeting the US but also reaching people in the UK and around the world.

Disrupting these criminal centers resulted in the rescue of 117 individuals who had been trafficked to work against their will in scam compounds in Ghana. These victims had been forced to work for scam operations by criminal syndicates and were rescued from imprisonment in a residential compound. The victims were malnourished and subjected to both physical and psychological abuses by their captors, who were arrested and are facing prosecution.

This operation identified and disrupted a range of fraud types connected to these networks, including: