FBI Reports $17 Billion Scam-Center Tally as West Africa Raids Net 28 Arrests

The FBI said on Oct. 13, 2026, that its Operation Blackout campaign against overseas scam centers had seized roughly $17 billion in "assets and crypto," as the Justice Department detailed a coordinated enforcement crackdown across West Africa.

The latest effort produced 28 arrests in Ghana and Nigeria during the week beginning Oct. 6, according to a DOJ announcement. Participating companies reported removing more than 3.7 million accounts, pages and groups that targeted people in the U.S., the UK and elsewhere. The disrupted schemes included cryptocurrency investment fraud, law-enforcement impersonation and extortion.

The operation combined physical raids with real-time intelligence sharing and takedowns of the online accounts used to reach victims. Private-sector partners also identified more than $11 million in potentially freezable funds, DOJ said—a recovery lead, rather than money already seized or returned to victims. That distinction runs through the campaign's numbers generally: identified, frozen, seized and returned are different stages, and not every figure cited reaches the last one.

In an official post on X, the FBI credited the broader Blackout campaign with hundreds of arrests of alleged scammers, the freeing of thousands of trafficked workers and coordination among more than 20 countries. The bureau also said more than 10,000 Americans had been warned and an estimated $670 million in losses prevented. The trafficked-worker count sits alongside the financial figures as a measure of the campaign's scope.

What the $17 Billion Figure Covers

The $17 billion is a cumulative campaign tally, not the proceeds of the latest West Africa raids. FBI Director Kash Patel had already cited the same approximate seizure total on Sept. 29, and the bureau's Oct. 13 post does not specify the period covered or break out cryptocurrency from other assets. Read against the Sept. 29 citation, the recurring approximate figure points to a running campaign total rather than a fresh count from the West Africa week.

Earlier crypto actions help explain the scale of the campaign without establishing that breakdown. In a July 27 opinion article for Fox News, Patel included the Prince Holding Group case in his account of the FBI's global scam-center operations. DOJ said on Oct. 14, 2025 that approximately 127,271 bitcoin, valued at about $15 billion at that time, were in U.S. government custody in that case—a holding that, at the valuations cited, is of the same order as the entire campaign total, though the FBI has not said how or whether it is counted.

A separate, narrower tally comes from DOJ's Scam Center Strike Force. On Feb. 26, prosecutors reported more than $580 million in cryptocurrency freezes and seizures over three months, a development previously covered by The Defiant. Those figures cannot simply be added to the FBI's total without an accounting of overlapping cases. Unlike the FBI's undated cumulative number, the Strike Force figure covers a defined three-month window.

International Partners, Local Authority

DOJ said the latest disruption week was hosted by the UK's National Crime Agency in London. Participants included the FBI, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department and Homeland Security Investigations, alongside authorities from Ghana, Nigeria, Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand, as well as Interpol. Binance, Coinbase, Chainalysis, Elliptic and TRM Labs were among the private-sector participants, a lineup spanning trading venues and the blockchain-analytics firms that trace on-chain flows.

Who commands the raids has become a point of contention. In an Oct. 8 statement, Ghana's Cyber Security Authority rejected any portrayal of its Blackout operation, also called Operation Cyber Hunt, as independently conceived or commanded by the FBI. It credited the FBI and the NCA with intelligence contributions but said Ghanaian institutions planned and executed the operation. Both accounts describe the same collaboration; the dispute is over who initiated and directed it.

DOJ's Oct. 13 account likewise identified Ghanaian agencies as leading the Ghana operation, with support from the NCA, the FBI and Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. It said 117 trafficking victims identified in Sasaabi were awaiting repatriation to Nigeria. The open items from the announcements are concrete: whether the $11 million in flagged funds moves toward freezing or return, whether the FBI later specifies the period and asset mix behind the $17 billion, and how the Sasaabi repatriations proceed.