Interpol says Thai crypto wallet moved $122.5 million in scam funds

Thai police arrested two people accused of helping launder money from romance-scam victims through cryptocurrency, Interpol said. One suspect, age 20, controlled a crypto wallet that processed more than $122.5 million over 10 months, putting the case at the center of a wider global fraud crackdown.

The arrests came through Operation First Light 2026, a four-month effort coordinated by Interpol across 97 countries and territories. For everyday crypto users, the case shows how fraud networks use the same blockchain tools as legitimate traders, including token swaps, while law enforcement is increasingly tracking those movements across borders.

According to Interpol, the Thai case involved proceeds from romance scams being converted into several cryptocurrencies. Investigators said the operators used cross-chain swaps, which move tokens between different blockchains, to make the money trail harder to follow.

A global fraud sweep

Operation First Light ran from mid-January through the end of April, Interpol said. Authorities made 5,811 arrests and intercepted $293 million in illicit assets during the campaign.

Interpol said officials identified more than 142,000 victims, blocked 31,014 bank accounts and reviewed more than 152,000 cases. Some asset freezes used I-GRIP, Interpol’s stop-payment tool for interrupting transfers of both traditional money and virtual assets.

Tomonobu Kaya, who leads Interpol’s financial crime and anti-corruption center, said criminal groups exploit psychology to manipulate targets and argued that countries need to work together to counter those networks.

How romance-scam laundering works

Romance scams, also known as “pig butchering,” usually begin with a scammer building trust over time before steering a victim into a fake investment scheme. In many recent cases, that fake investment involves crypto, according to the pattern described by Interpol and blockchain investigators.

Once money enters crypto wallets, launderers can try to blur the path by moving funds quickly, swapping one token for another and shifting assets across blockchains. A blockchain is a public transaction ledger, but cross-chain movement can add layers that slow investigators trying to connect deposits, swaps and withdrawals.

Ari Redbord, a former U.S. Treasury official now at blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs, told Decrypt last year that these scam operations were increasingly using stablecoins, low-fee networks and fast cross-chain swaps to split up flows and gain time. Stablecoins are crypto tokens designed to track the value of assets such as the U.S. dollar.

Interpol framed Operation First Light as a response to social engineering fraud, a broad category of scams that trick people into sending money or revealing information. The Thai arrests show how those schemes can connect personal manipulation, crypto transfers and international money-laundering networks in a single case.

This story draws on original reporting from Decrypt.