INTERPOL, the international police-cooperation body, published results from Operation Jackal IV on 25 August: 58 arrests, 263 suspects identified and 23 participating countries, from an operation that ran from November 2025 to June 2026 against West African organised crime groups1. INTERPOL does not make arrests itself. It coordinates the national forces that do, which is the whole point of counting countries here.
South Africa carried most of the enforcement, raiding seven Johannesburg locations, arresting 39 people, seizing US$2.67 million and blocking 257 bank accounts tied to romance and investment schemes2. One country therefore accounts for two thirds of the arrests in a 23-country operation, which says more about where the enforcement capacity sat than about where the fraud did.
The arrest count tells you the least about this operation and the country count the most. Freezing an account and arresting the person who opened it routinely sit in different jurisdictions, and each transfer of evidence between them runs on its own legal instrument. That is why an operation of this shape runs to eight months rather than eight weeks, and why the eventual number of arrests is a poor measure of what it cost.
Europol-backed police reached for the other lever in May, pulling 33 servers out of an anonymisation service that ransomware gangs relied on and interviewing its administrator in Ukraine. Property and people are separate problems with separate paperwork, and a fraud network sitting across two dozen countries makes you choose. Investigations remained open when INTERPOL published, so the 263 identified suspects are a working list rather than a result.
