Interpol: 20-year-old wallet moved $123M in romance scams

Thai police arrested two people after Interpol reported that a 20-year-old controlled a cryptocurrency wallet that processed roughly $122.5 million over 10 months in funds stolen from romance-scam victims. Investigators say the wallet used cross-chain token swaps to obscure the flow of money.

The arrests were part of Operation First Light 2026, a coordinated campaign that ran from mid-January to the end of April across 97 countries and territories. Interpol reported the operation produced 5,811 arrests, intercepted $293 million in illicit assets, identified more than 142,000 victims, blocked 31,014 bank accounts and analyzed over 152,000 cases. Authorities used Interpol’s I-GRIP stop-payment tool to check and halt flows of both fiat and virtual assets during the operation.

According to investigators, the suspects moved stolen funds into a mix of cryptocurrencies, favoring stablecoins and low-fee chains. They then executed rapid swaps across different blockchains to fragment transactions and complicate tracing. Law enforcement officials describe the tactic as a way to break the money trail once victims send funds on-chain.

Romance scams, sometimes referred to as “pig-butchering,” begin with fraudsters building a relationship online over weeks or months before directing victims to fake crypto investments. After funds are transferred to crypto accounts, operators often route the proceeds through multiple tokens and blockchains to hide the origin.

“Criminal syndicates exploit human psychology to manipulate their targets,” Tomonobu Kaya, head of Interpol’s financial crime and anti-corruption center, said in a statement, adding that coordinated action by many countries is needed to disrupt the networks behind these schemes.

Ari Redbord, a former U.S. Treasury official now at blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs, noted that cross-chain swaps and wide use of stablecoins allow operators to fragment movement and buy time while funds move across chains and tokens.

Thailand has been a frequent location for arrests connected to these networks because of its proximity to regions where fortified scam compounds operate. United Nations investigators estimate pig-butchering operations generated tens of billions of dollars between 2020 and 2024, with many schemes run from compounds in Southeast Asia that rely on trafficked and coerced labor. Thailand’s Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau receives hundreds of crypto-related complaints daily, with one recent study noting roughly 800 complaints a day focused on crypto-enabled fraud or laundering.

Responses in the region have included new criminal laws and longer sentences in other jurisdictions. Cambodia has adopted a law that can carry life sentences for organized scam bosses, and U.S. courts have imposed multi-year prison terms in large laundering cases, including a 20-year sentence tied to a $73 million scheme.

Interpol said Operation First Light was funded by China’s Ministry of Public Security and supported by regional policing bodies. The agency described the operation’s results as evidence of ongoing social-engineering fraud and the technical challenges investigators face when illicit proceeds are moved quickly through complex crypto pathways.