A global police thing called Operation HAECHI-V went down from July to November 2024, and they busted more than 5,500 people who were doing sketchy stuff with money online. They got over $400 million in fake money and real money too! It's like a bunch of countries' police forces teamed up to fight internet bad guys.
INTERPOL's big boss, Valdecy Urquiza, talked about how messed up it is when people lose all their savings and businesses get ruined because of these digital crimes. He said that we all need to work together to keep the internet and our bank stuff safe, like it's a huge group project for the whole world.
During this big op, Korean and Chinese cops worked together to shut down a huge scam group that pretended to be the good guys and took $1.1 billion from almost 2,000 people. They got 27 of these bad guys and are now trying to stop them from doing it again.
And get this, there's a new scam where the cyber crooks pretend to be your internet boyfriend or girlfriend and convince you to buy some cryptocurrency called USDT tokens. They say it's a good investment, but really, they just take all your money once you click a suspicious link. So, be careful with that lovey-dovey stuff online, it might just be someone trying to scam you.
This isn't the first time they did something like this. Last year, they caught almost 3,500 people doing the same thing across 34 different countries and took away $300 million of their dirty money. And before that, they busted over 1,000 people in Africa who were messing with computer stuff.
So, yeah, it's like a never-ending battle against the cyber baddies, but it's cool to see countries joining forces like a real-life Avengers team for the internet.