Ghana and Nigeria: 28 Arrested and 117 Trafficked Scam Workers Freed in a Global Crackdown

In Sasaabi, a suburb of Accra, Ghana's capital, police found 117 people who, authorities say, had been trafficked to Ghana and put to work running online scams. Most were Nigerian. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said they were malnourished and had suffered physical and psychological abuse. On 13 October 2026 Ghana's communications minister, Samuel Nartey George, said 120 Nigerians from the operation had been sent home with the help of the Ghana Air Force and the Ministry of Defence. He said they had been forced to work in cybercrime operations.

The raids were part of what the organisers called Joint Disruption Week, an operation hosted by the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) at its London headquarters from 6 to 9 October. More than 100 police officers and technology company staff took part, from 15 law enforcement agencies and 15 companies. By the US Department of Justice's (DOJ) count it produced 28 arrests: 19 in Ghana and nine in Nigeria. Meta removed more than 3.7 million accounts, pages and groups from Facebook and Instagram, and the companies taking part identified more than $11 million that could potentially be frozen. Participants called it the first such effort aimed at West Africa.

The arrested are suspects. None has been convicted, and no names had been made public by 20 October.

A week in London

The NCA said this was the fourth event of its kind and the first it had hosted, paid for by the Home Office's Integrated Security Fund. The FBI, the Nigeria Police Force and Ghana's Cyber Security Authority (CSA) took part. So did agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and India, along with INTERPOL. On the US side were the DOJ, the Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, the Treasury and the Scam Center Strike Force, a DOJ unit launched by Jeanine Pirro, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, and run from her office.

The companies, as listed by the DOJ, were Adobe, Binance, Coinbase, Chainalysis, Cyjax, Elliptic, Flashpoint, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Silent Push, Starlink and TRM Labs. Binance and Coinbase are crypto exchanges, businesses that work like online stockbrokers for digital money. Chainalysis, Elliptic and TRM Labs trace payments on blockchains, the public ledgers on which crypto transfers are recorded, much as forensic accountants follow money through bank statements.

The NCA credited Meta with coordinating the event. Pirro said the operation began with information from Meta, and said she was "very proud to work with Meta." Meta said most of the 3.7 million accounts it removed appeared to target people in the US and UK, using profiles that impersonated American and British users. It said it also shared leads on more than 30 suspected scam centres. Coinbase said it found more than 65 people being scammed at that moment and stopped more than $415,000 in potential losses. Silent Push said it mapped more than 35,000 malicious web domains and nearly 700 messaging channels tied to scam centres across Africa.

Inside the houses

According to the CSA, the Ghana operation followed intelligence received on 26 August 2026 that several apartments were being used as bases for organised cybercrime, including romance scams. It named Ubuntu Haven Estate in Kpone Katamanso, Franko Estate in Ga North, and other locations in Ga West, all in the Greater Accra Region. Ghanaian police had already raided suspected scam centres at the end of September, seizing 85 phones and 44 laptops, the NCA said.

The CSA listed what its operation seized: 136 mobile phones, 130 laptops, internet equipment, four vehicles (one of which, it said, had been stolen from Canada), jewellery and ten Nigerian passports. The DOJ put the Ghana haul at 303 electronic devices. In Nigeria, police arrested nine people across Delta State and seized six laptops, 35 phones and 12 routers, according to the NCA.

The DOJ said 89 victims of the scams had been identified so far, with estimated losses of $8.3 million. According to the DOJ, the schemes included impersonating police officers, "digital arrest" extortion (convincing a victim that they face arrest unless they pay) and crypto investment fraud; the CSA also named romance scams. The last is known as pig butchering: a stranger spends weeks building trust by text, then steers the victim to a trading website that shows invented profits and keeps every dollar paid in. Nick Sharp, the NCA's deputy director of fraud, said it was not yet known how many British or American victims were involved, because forensic work on the seized devices was still going on.

"These networks steal savings on one side of the screen, and people's freedom on the other," said Matthew Floyd, a deputy assistant director in the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division.

Who led the Ghana raid

The operation produced a public dispute before it produced a press release. On 8 October Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, posted on X about a takedown in Ghana under the FBI's global Operation Blackout campaign, citing nearly $10 million in losses, 89 victims, more than 130 people "arrested or detained" (a figure that, Fox News Digital reported, included suspected trafficking victims due to be sent home) and more than 300 devices seized. "These scam compounds target American citizens and destroy lives," he wrote, according to Ghana's Daily Graphic. In a statement to Fox News Digital he said the FBI was "blowing these compounds up."

The same day the CSA issued a statement in Accra. "The Authority rejects any portrayal of the operation as independently conceived, commanded or executed by the FBI," it said. It said the operation, which it also called Operation Cyber Hunt, had been led and coordinated by the CSA and planned and run by Ghanaian authorities, and added: "Foreign law enforcement agencies have no independent authority to exercise police powers or conduct arrests within Ghana." It thanked the FBI and the NCA for "valuable intelligence contributions" and asked the FBI to "clarify its public account." Its own figures were eight suspects arrested and 120 people rescued. Ghana's communications minister, Samuel Nartey George, objected on X the same day, writing that to suggest the FBI "acted solely to execute this operation" undermined future collaboration. The CSA listed Ghana's National Security Council, the police Criminal Investigations Department, Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the Ghana Immigration Service and the Office of the Attorney-General among the agencies involved.

©CMZ chart. Data: Kash Patel on X, DOJ, Ghana CSA

On 11 October Patel posted again, saying the FBI's crackdown "continues to deliver outstanding results in Ghana" and claiming about $17 billion seized worldwide under Operation Blackout. The FBI has not given a breakdown of that figure. No public FBI reply to the CSA had been reported by 20 October. The three sets of numbers (more than 130 detained, eight or 19 arrested, 117 or 120 freed) have not been reconciled by any of the agencies.

From Cambodia to Accra

Scam compounds, guarded buildings where trafficked workers are made to run frauds around the clock, became notorious in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. The best-known alleged operator is Cambodia's Prince Group, whose chairman, Chen Zhi, was charged in the US in 2025; the DOJ is trying to seize about $15 billion in bitcoin it links to his network. In June 2026 Meta and other companies ran a similar joint operation against scam networks in Southeast Asia.

Meta said West Africa's centres are generally more spread out and less industrial than those in Southeast Asia. It described the basic model of a scam centre as the same everywhere: recruit workers, train them in manipulation, and run coordinated frauds across several platforms at once. Americans reported $7.2 billion lost to crypto investment scams in 2025, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), up 24% on the year before.

Meta's part has drawn criticism. A Reuters investigation in 2025, based on internal documents, reported that Meta expected about 10% of its 2024 revenue, roughly $16 billion, to come from adverts for scams and banned goods. Meta disputes the figure.