The U.S. Department of Justice announced the results of Disruption Week, a first-of-its-kind coordination exercise under its Scam Center Strike Force that brought U.S. agencies, foreign law enforcement and private firms together to target cyber-enabled and cryptocurrency investment fraud aimed at Americans. The department said companies voluntarily interrupted more than 1.4 million social media and email accounts and related internet infrastructure used by transnational organized crime groups in Southeast Asia, and that government information sharing enabled firms to voluntarily freeze more than USD 3.8 million in cryptocurrency tied to laundering stolen funds. The effort centered on meetings in Washington from May 18 to May 21, where investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Secret Service and Homeland Security Investigations shared target information with companies including Apple, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Microsoft, SpaceX, TRM Labs and others, alongside law enforcement counterparts from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Thailand and the United Kingdom. Based on that information and their own data, participants identified and disrupted scam actors violating providers’ terms of service, interrupted malicious IP traffic and network connections, decommissioned servers and hosting environments, referred multiple scammers and scam platforms to U.S. authorities, and supported arrests of seven suspects in Thailand and new cases opened by the Royal Thai Police. The department added that the exchanges also built channels for future disruption of scam activity using U.S. networks.

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