Justice Department’s West Africa crackdown seizes 3.7M scam accounts, flags $11M crypto

• Authorities arrested 19 people in Ghana and nine in Nigeria, seizing 303 and 53 electronic devices respectively.
• The DOJ identified $11 million in potentially freezable cryptocurrency, a fraction of the $938 million its Scam Center Strike Force has restrained in Southeast Asia-linked cases.
• Ghanaian authorities rescued 117 trafficking victims forced to run scam operations; they now await repatriation to Nigeria.

• $11M crypto flagged as potentially freezable, versus $938M restrained in Asia cases
• 3.7M fraudulent accounts and pages removed across participating platforms
• $938M total funds restrained by the Strike Force since its launch

The Department of Justice said in a press release that the operation, hosted at the UK National Crime Agency’s London headquarters during the week of Tuesday, October 6, 2026, marked the first coordinated law enforcement effort aimed specifically at West African scam compounds. Investigators worked alongside Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Adobe, Binance, Coinbase, Chainalysis, Elliptic, TRM Labs and other firms, who voluntarily pulled down accounts on their own networks and passed leads on more than 30 suspected scam centers to law enforcement, according to reporting by Cryptopolitan.

Ghana Operation Nets 19 Arrests, 117 Trafficking Victims

Ghanaian authorities arrested 19 individuals and seized 303 electronic devices, the DOJ said. Officials there also identified 117 trafficking victims pending repatriation to Nigeria.

Nigerian authorities arrested nine individuals and seized 53 devices during the same enforcement window. Combined, the two countries’ raids produced 28 arrests, the headline figure the DOJ used to frame the week’s results.

FBI Director Kash Patel credited the cross-border coordination for the outcome.

Thanks to brilliant partnership with the Department of Justice and the private sector, across multiple African countries, we arrested dozens of criminal actors, seized hundreds of devices, identified at least $11 million in potentially freezable funds, and truly saved lives.

Kash Patel, FBI Director

$11 Million Flagged Sum Trails $938 Million From Southeast Asia Cases

The $11 million in crypto identified in West Africa is only potentially freezable, not yet seized or forfeited, which separates it from prior Strike Force actions. In September 2026, the DOJ seized Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language Telegram marketplace where vendors sold scammers custom fraud websites and money-laundering services, restraining $52 million in a single day and pushing the Strike Force’s total funds seized to roughly $938 million.

That gap reflects structural differences between the two regions. Southeast Asian scam compounds tend to be concentrated under a handful of Chinese-run operators, making large seizures possible in single strikes, while West African networks are more diffuse, running fake-job, romance and police-impersonation schemes across many smaller accounts and payment channels, as this outlet has previously covered in the context of money-mule laundering prosecutions.

FBI Criminal Division Deputy Assistant Director Matthew Floyd told Axios that investigators aim to dismantle the criminal enterprises behind individual scams, not just stop single incidents. Chainalysis has separately estimated that crypto scams could account for more than $17 billion in stolen funds, with impersonation fraud rising over 1,400% in 2025.

Exchanges Face Rising Pressure to Flag Flows Faster

Coinbase said it identified more than 65 active victims during the operation and prevented roughly $415,000 in losses, the kind of self-reported figure exchanges now use to demonstrate compliance cooperation.

A FinCEN alert issued in September 2026 described how scammers layer proceeds through multiple wallets and intermediaries to frustrate tracing, a pattern that complicates the kind of rapid freezes this operation relied on.

Speed remains the operation’s weakest link. A prior Cryptopolitan analysis of 2,955 Tether freezes found an average gap of more than two hours between initiating and executing a freeze, enough time for funds to move, and separate FATF findings flagged a Nigerian case in which roughly $600 million sat in a wallet offshore exchanges failed to catch in time.

Those gaps matter more as platforms like previously documented scam-linked wallet compromises show how quickly stolen crypto can be laundered once it leaves a victim’s custody. TRM Labs, one of the private partners in the operation, has estimated Chinese-language laundering networks processed more than $100 billion in 2025 alone.

The CCS read. We read this less as a law-enforcement win and more as a stress test for exchange compliance teams. Coinbase’s self-reported $415,000 save shows platforms now compete on fraud-prevention metrics the way they once competed on fees, and that dynamic will push custody and AML spending higher across the industry regardless of how much of the $11 million is ever actually recovered.

The $11 million identified in West Africa remains unconfirmed as seized, and the 117 trafficking victims in Ghana are still awaiting repatriation to Nigeria. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro’s Scam Center Strike Force, which has already restrained $938 million tied to Southeast Asian networks, has not said whether it will deploy similarly to West Africa or whether this week’s accounts takedown will be followed by further arrests.