A 20-year-old suspect in Thailand allegedly laundered more than $122.5 million in romance scam proceeds through a single crypto wallet over ten months. That is not a typo. One wallet, one suspect, ten months, nine figures.
Thai police arrested two individuals tied to the scheme as part of Operation First Light 2026, a coordinated global crackdown that Interpol revealed on July 9, 2026. The operation ran from January 15 to April 30 and pulled in 97 countries.
The final tally: 5,811 arrests, $293 million in seized assets, and more than 142,000 identified victims worldwide.
How a single wallet moved $122.5M without tripping alarms
The suspects allegedly used cross-chain token swaps, converting assets across multiple blockchains to make the transaction trail look like a tangle of unrelated moves instead of a single flow of dirty money.
