Operation Jackal IV has led to the arrest of 58 suspects and the identification of 263 persons of interest following an eight-month international police operation targeting West African organised crime networks.
INTERPOL announced the results of Operation Jackal IV on Tuesday. It described a coordinated push against groups including the Nigerian-founded Black Axe syndicate. The operation ran from November 2025 to June 2026, drawing in law enforcement from 22 countries across six continents.
Beyond the headline numbers, Operation Jackal IV signals something more unsettling for victims still recovering from their losses. Investigators traced illicit financial flows tied to romance scams, cryptocurrency fraud and business email compromise schemes. These are the tactics Black Axe and affiliated networks have leaned on for years to drain accounts from Lagos to London.
South Africa recorded the highest arrest count. Police raided seven locations in Johannesburg linked to a syndicate accused of running romance and investment scams targeting retirees in English-speaking countries, INTERPOL said. Thirty-nine suspects were detained there alone.
That single South African cell allegedly split its members into “conversion” and “retention” roles. It was one of the internal structures investigators mapped during Operation Jackal IV, working victims through different stages of the fraud before draining their accounts. Authorities seized roughly $2.67 million and froze 257 bank accounts tied to the group. It is the sort of granular detail that shows how professionalised these networks have become.
Argentina’s contribution to Operation Jackal IV offered a different but equally telling thread. Investigators there identified 196 suspects connected to a Crime-as-a-Service operation. The group was accused of selling website domains and money laundering support to West African criminal groups. That work led to 17 arrests.
The finding matters. It points to a newer layer of the fraud economy: specialist providers who never touch a victim directly, yet keep the machinery running for those actively doing it. The findings highlight the growing sophistication of transnational cybercrime networks.
Tomonobu Kaya directs INTERPOL’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre. He framed Operation Jackal IV as proof that following the money still works. “By following illicit financial flows across borders, we are attacking the very lifeblood of organized crime,” he said in the statement announcing the results. Whether that lifeblood is being cut, rather than briefly interrupted, is the harder question this latest round of arrests raises.
Black Axe has weathered pressure like this before. Operation Jackal III led to roughly 300 arrests across 21 countries back in 2024. Yet the group is still estimated to generate billions of dollars annually from cells scattered across dozens of countries. Each new operation removes members and disrupts specific cells, but the wider network built up over decades has proven hard to dismantle outright.
Nigeria took part in Operation Jackal IV alongside Argentina, South Africa and nineteen other countries. The arrests renew pressure on domestic agencies to match international momentum with local prosecutions. Black Axe was founded at the University of Benin in 1977. It has since grown into a transnational enterprise with a footprint in the United States, Britain, the UAE and beyond. Sustained cooperation between INTERPOL and national police forces, rather than any single sweep, will decide whether that footprint finally starts to shrink.
INTERPOL noted that many of the cases opened under Operation Jackal IV remain under investigation. That means the current tally of 58 arrests could still grow as analysts work through seized financial records. For now, the operation offers one of the clearer pictures yet of how West African fraud networks organise themselves across borders. It also shows how much coordinated policing it still takes to slow them down.
