Twenty, Thriving, and Moving $122.5M in Pig-Butchering Loot 🐷⛓️

Thai police arrested two suspects connected to a cryptocurrency laundering network that processed more than $122.5 million in romance-scam proceeds over 10 months, including a wallet controlled by a 20-year-old, Interpol said Thursday. The operators routed the funds through cryptocurrencies and used cross-chain token swaps to shift assets between blockchains, a technique designed to obscure the money trail, according to investigators.

The Thai case was part of Operation First Light 2026, an Interpol-coordinated anti-fraud campaign that ran from January 15 to April 30 across 97 countries and territories. The operation resulted in 5,811 arrests, the interception of approximately $293 million in illicit assets and the identification of more than 142,000 victims, Interpol said. Authorities also blocked 31,014 bank accounts, resolved 23,715 cases, analyzed 152,808 cases, identified 15,606 suspects and issued 99 notices and diffusions. Some of the freezes relied on I-GRIP, Interpol's Global Rapid Intervention of Payments, which can halt flows of both fiat and virtual assets.

Tomonobu Kaya, director of Interpol's Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre, said social engineering scams continue to pose a significant threat to global society, adding that criminal syndicates exploit human psychology to manipulate their targets. "No nation can stay safe unless all countries are equipped and committed to jointly fighting back," Kaya said.

The operation surfaced additional cases beyond Thailand. In Palau, authorities deported 22 people tied to hotel-based scam centers that used cryptocurrency and illegal gambling websites to target victims abroad. In Eswatini, police arrested 82 people and dismantled a network running illegal gambling, money laundering and impersonation scams. In Singapore and Oman, I-GRIP was used to block a $6.6 million transfer linked to a business email compromise scam, according to Interpol.

The crackdown comes as crypto-related fraud has drawn heightened enforcement scrutiny worldwide. In April, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that Americans filed 181,565 crypto-related scam complaints totaling more than $11 billion in losses in 2025. Romance scams, commonly known as pig-butchering schemes, typically involve perpetrators building trust with victims over weeks or months through social media or dating platforms before steering them toward fraudulent investment opportunities, after which launderers move the proceeds rapidly across blockchains and between tokens to fragment the financial trail.