Key Notes
- The UAE-led campaign reports more than 960 arrests across 30 countries during July through September.
- Authorities identified over $39 billion in fraud-linked funds and crypto but did not disclose a recovered total.
- INTERPOL, GASA and 13 private-sector partners supported the operation, with WAM reporting more than 123 million blocked fraud attempts.
A UAE-led international fraud operation resulted in more than 960 arrests and identified over $39 billion in funds and cryptocurrencies linked to scams, according to the UAE Ministry of Interior. The figures cover a coordinated campaign involving 30 countries, rather than arrests made only inside the Emirates.
Operation Confrontation Ghost ran from July 1 to September 30, 2026, targeting AI-enabled fraud, digital financial fraud and online sextortion. The ministry detailed the results in an October 22 announcement, following an earlier report by Emirates News Agency, WAM.
The $39 billion figure describes assets investigators linked to alleged fraud. Participating authorities and companies are still working toward recovery, the ministry said. Its release does not disclose how much has been frozen, seized or returned to victims.
Arrests, Raids and Account Disruptions
The ministry says the three-month effort identified more than 15,500 victims and over 3,500 suspects across multiple countries. Those counts measure different groups and should not be added together as a total number of arrests.
The announced results include:
- More than 960 arrests.
- Raids on 29 fraud centres.
- More than 570 social-media accounts shut down.
- Over 9,000 pieces of intelligence exchanged between participants.
The ministry also identified more than 4,126 bank accounts linked to fraud. WAM’s account reports that 4,126 bank accounts were blocked and says the operation thwarted more than 123.71 million online fraud attempts worldwide.
The attempt count is a prevention measure reported by the authorities, not a count of individual victims or completed criminal cases. The published summaries do not explain how the attempts were counted or break the results down by country. Arrests likewise do not establish convictions.
Crypto, Payments and Technology Companies Join the Effort
The campaign brought national law-enforcement agencies together with INTERPOL, the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and 13 private-sector partners. The ministry describes an effort to combine investigative intelligence with technical capabilities across borders.
Crypto.com participated alongside Mastercard, Meta, TikTok, Group-IB and Huawei. The other listed partners were Bayut, Dubizzle, Feedzai, Ghostly Solutions, Meiya Pico, Outseer and Trend Micro.
The release does not assign particular arrests, account closures or recovered sums to individual companies. Their named participation describes cooperation in the operation, rather than a separate enforcement result credited to each partner.
The participating countries included China, Japan, Singapore, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the United Kingdom, as well as Canada, France, Brazil, the Philippines, South Korea and the UAE. The full group spanned five continents.
Results were presented at a UAE-led side event during the Vienna conference of parties to the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Officials described faster intelligence sharing as a way to pursue networks that exploit the separation between national jurisdictions, online platforms and financial systems.
Identifying Assets Is One Stage of Recovery
The operation’s $39 billion headline combines money and digital assets associated with suspected fraud. The public announcement does not provide a cryptocurrency-only subtotal, an estimate of net victim losses or a completed recovery total. It also does not identify particular tokens or publish wallet addresses for that aggregate.
Those distinctions matter because tracing an asset, restricting an account, obtaining a seizure order and returning funds are separate outcomes. A blocked account does not by itself establish the amount eventually recoverable for victims.
CoinScreamer’s Brooklyn report examined a separate operation that disrupted hundreds of scam websites and servers while reporting a much smaller initial fund seizure. Its figures belong to that investigation and are not part of the UAE-led operation’s totals.
Our coverage of a Hong Kong scam shows another method: copying a familiar work chat to obtain an unauthorized crypto transfer. No link between that case and Operation Confrontation Ghost has been established in the sources reviewed here.
For the multinational campaign, the reported arrests and infrastructure disruptions are substantial. The outstanding financial question is how much of the identified assets authorities can secure and ultimately return—a figure the announcement leaves undisclosed.
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