More than 3.7 million accounts, groups and pages on Facebook and Instagram tied to West Africa were removed, Meta said — one visible metric of a London-hosted, multinational crackdown that law enforcement and industry participants called the largest joint scam operation to date and the first focused on West Africa.
Joint Disruption Week: scale, timing and headline results
The operation, billed as “Joint Disruption Week,” combined a coordinated week of action with earlier activity that began in September with raids in Ghana. Authorities reported 28 arrests, the rescue of 117 trafficking victims and the seizure of hundreds of electronic devices. Participants also identified more than $11 million in potentially freezable funds and shared more than 30 leads on scam centers.
Organizers described the effort as a culmination of agencies meeting to “combine forces,” and said this kind of consolidated action will recur, though the interval for future operations remains to be determined.
Who joined the operation: governments and industry together
The London-hosted activity brought together a wide mix of national law enforcement bodies and private companies. U.S. participants included the Justice Department, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, Homeland Security Investigations and the Homeland Security Task Force, as well as the Scam Center Strike Force under the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. International partners named in the announcement were the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, the Nigerian Joint Case Team on Cybercrimes, the Nigeria Police Force’s National Cybercrime Center, the Ghanaian Cyber Security Authority, INTERPOL and agencies from Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand.
Private-sector contributors included Adobe, Binance, Coinbase, Cyjax, Elliptic, Chainalysis, Flashpoint, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Silent Push, Starlink and TRM Labs.
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See what we buildPlatform actions: Meta’s removals and takedowns
Meta said it removed more than 3.7 million accounts, groups and pages from Facebook and Instagram that were based in West Africa, a majority of which targeted people in the United States and United Kingdom. The takedowns were presented as part of the industry’s contribution to the joint effort to disrupt operations that used social platforms to reach and defraud victims.
Types of scams, law enforcement perspective and quoted officials
Authorities said the operations targeted a range of frauds: law enforcement impersonation scams, digital arrest extortion schemes, “pig butchering” and other online fraud operations aiming at victims across the globe. Participants characterized the campaign as the largest joint scam operation to date.
Kelly Milliron, acting chief of staff and counselor to the Assistant Attorney General leading the Criminal Division, told reporters: “For so long, the problem of international scams seemed impossible to tackle. But now, because of collaborations like Joint Disruption Week, we have a plan, a consolidated approach, bringing together people that can bring solutions and, most of all, safety for our citizens.”
Jeanine Pirro, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, emphasized the timing and partnership with the United Kingdom: “The aim is to bring cases in parallel and also to combat fraud together through joint targeting. This was the perfect time to continue that partnership.”
On the question of asset seizures, Matthew Floyd, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, cautioned that identification is only the first step: “Identifying the assets is the easy part, and tracing them, going after and developing probable cause within our investigations so that we can legally seize them does require a little bit of work.” He described identified funds folding into ongoing investigations as work continues.
What this means for law enforcement, technology platforms, and victims
- Law enforcement agencies: The operation demonstrated a model for parallel prosecution and shared targeting across borders — participants said they will repeat combined meetings and coordinated actions, though the cadence is yet to be set.
- Technology platforms and vendors: Companies such as Meta, Google, Microsoft, Chainalysis and others played active roles in takedowns and detection. Platforms will likely continue to be central partners for identification and removal of accounts tied to fraud hubs.
- Victims and the public: Authorities reported large-scale rescues — 117 trafficking victims freed — and signaled that disruption operations can yield direct, on-the-ground results as well as account takedowns and leads for future investigations.
Some on Capitol Hill, the Justice Department release noted, have raised concerns about whether U.S. anti-scam operations are sufficiently coordinated — a line of questioning that the organizers appear to have intended to answer by combining agencies and industry partners for a concentrated effort. The operation yielded concrete outputs — arrests, rescues, device seizures, millions of removed accounts and identified funds — while leaving key follow-up tasks: tracing and legally seizing assets, prosecuting cases in parallel, and setting a repeatable cadence for joint action.
