A criminal wallet at the center of an international police operation moved more than $122.5 million in cryptocurrency over ten months, laundering the proceeds of romance scams that prey on people looking for companionship.

The finding came out of Operation First Light 2026, a four-month campaign coordinated by Interpol that the agency detailed on Thursday. Police in Thailand made two arrests and traced a laundering scheme that pushed money from romance scams through cross-chain token swaps, hopping between cryptocurrencies to hide where the funds came from. One suspect, aged 20, controlled the wallet that handled the $122.5 million.

The Thai case was one piece of a sweep that spanned 97 countries and territories between mid-January and the end of April. Interpol said the operation led to 5,811 arrests and the interception of $293 million in illicit assets, and identified more than 142,000 victims worldwide. Investigators blocked or froze bank accounts and digital wallets, in part through a stop-payment system Interpol runs to halt fraudulent transfers before the money vanishes.

Romance scams, in which a fraudster builds a fake relationship before steering the target toward a bogus investment, are one form of what police call social engineering, the manipulation of a person’s trust to extract money or information. Losses from these schemes have climbed as criminals lean on stablecoins and cross-chain tools to move payouts quickly.

“Criminal syndicates exploit human psychology to manipulate their targets, and no nation can stay safe unless all countries are equipped and committed to jointly fighting back”, Tomonobu Kaya, director of Interpol’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre, said in the announcement.

Other cases in the operation ranged from a scam network in Eswatini that built a replica of a Brazilian police station to fool victims, to a $6.6 million business email fraud blocked across Singapore and Oman. U.S. authorities have warned for years that crypto romance and pig-butchering scams drain billions of dollars from victims each year.

AI-assisted content: This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and was reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a member of the Unchained editorial team before publication.

Interpol Links $122M Crypto Wallet to Romance Scams in Global Fraud Crackdown

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