Cybersecurity

INTERPOL Rounds Up 574 Wolves in Africa, Recovers $3 Million Worth of Stolen Wool

NeglectedSheep

• 2 min read
INTERPOL Rounds Up 574 Wolves in Africa, Recovers $3 Million Worth of Stolen Wool

Look, I'm on hour 26 of being awake because some lamb in accounting clicked a link promising "FREE GRAIN DELIVERY" and now I'm rebuilding three servers. But even I had to pause my fourth energy drink to acknowledge that INTERPOL just pulled off something beautiful.

Operation Sentinel. What a name. What a concept. Actually doing something about the wolves instead of just sending me another compliance form to fill out.

Between late October and late November 2025, authorities from 19 different countries managed to arrest 574 suspects and claw back $3 million. The main targets? Business email compromise scams, digital extortion, the usual parade of predators circling the flock.

You know what business email compromise is, right? It's when a wolf puts on a shepherd costume and emails the accounting lambs saying "Hey it's me, your CEO, please wire $50,000 to this totally legitimate account in a country you've never heard of." And the lambs do it. Every. Single. Time.

I've sent 47 training emails about this. Forty-seven. I have the read receipts. Nobody opened them.

But sure, let's celebrate. INTERPOL actually coordinated something across 19 countries. That's more international cooperation than I can get between our IT department and HR, and we share the same coffee machine.

Meanwhile, some Ukrainian ransomware affiliate also pleaded guilty somewhere in all this mess. Good. One less tick trying to burrow into our systems while I'm busy explaining to the shepherds why we can't just "turn off" the electric fence because it's "inconvenient."

Remediation

Fine. Here's what you do, since apparently nobody reads my other 200 memos.

  1. Train your lambs to verify wire transfer requests through a second channel. Like, I don't know, walking ten feet to ask the actual person.
  2. Implement email authentication. SPF, DKIM, DMARC. I've explained these acronyms four times this quarter. I'm not doing it again.
  3. Flag external emails with big scary warnings. Not that anyone reads those either.
  4. Maybe, just maybe, don't click the thing.

I'm going back to my tickets. There are 47 of them now. There were 45 when I started writing this.

Original Report: https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/interpol-arrests-574-in-africa.html