FBI director Kash Patel said on October 11, via a post on X, that Operation Blackout had seized approximately $17 billion in assets tied to crypto scam operations, alongside hundreds of arrests worldwide. The bureau has not published a detailed breakdown of how that total was reached, leaving open questions about which seizures and jurisdictions it covers.
The operation's physical actions span several continents. In Cambodia, a three-day raid in August targeted the O'Smach complex, a roughly 200-acre site where 28 buildings were searched. In Madagascar, authorities dismantled 13 scam centers in September that the FBI says were controlled by Chinese criminal syndicates, examining more than 3,200 devices in the process.
A separate prevention strand of the campaign, called Operation Level Up, claims to have warned 10,406 potential victims in time to avoid losses, preventing an estimated $660 million in damage and seizing or freezing $122 million in cryptocurrency.
West Africa raid disputed
A coordinated takedown week run out of London led, according to the FBI and reported by Fox News, to 28 arrests across West Africa, split between 19 in Ghana and 9 in Nigeria. Investigators seized more than 350 devices and identified at least $11 million in funds that could potentially be frozen. Meta said it removed 3.7 million Facebook and Instagram accounts linked to the networks, and OpenAI assisted the investigation.
Ghana's cybersecurity agency gave a markedly different account on October 8, describing its own domestic effort under the name Cyber Hunt. It reported 8 suspects arrested and 120 people rescued, most of them Nigerian nationals. The same day, Patel cited a figure of more than 130 people arrested or detained. Three days after his initial statement, Patel acknowledged Ghana's role in the operation.
The Prince Group seizure
The announcement follows a separate and much larger action by US justice authorities, who in October 2025 began confiscating 127,271 bitcoin linked to the Prince Group, a network accused of running forced labor camps in Cambodia under Chen Zhi, who has since been arrested in the country. At the time of seizure, the holding was valued at approximately $15 billion, making it the largest crypto seizure on record. At a bitcoin price of roughly $84,000, the same holding would today be worth approximately $10.7 billion. The FBI has not said whether the Prince Group bitcoin is counted within the $17 billion Blackout figure.
For European observers tracking cross-border enforcement against crypto fraud networks, the episode underlines both the scale claimed by US authorities and the difficulty of verifying such figures when partner nations offer conflicting versions of the same operation.
