In a sweeping display of international law-enforcement coordination, Interpol this month announced the seizure of roughly $97 million in cryptocurrency as part of a global operation that recovered a total of about $439 million in illicit proceeds. The effort — codenamed Operation HAECHI VI — ran for several months across 40 countries and targeted an array of online financial crimes, from investment fraud and romance scams to business-email compromise and money-laundering linked to illegal gambling.
The headline figure — nearly a hundred million dollars in crypto frozen across hundreds of wallets — is striking for more than its size. It signals three things at once: that criminal gangs remain heavily active in exploiting digital-asset rails; that blockchain forensics and cross-border policing have materially improved; and that the longstanding myth of crypto as an impenetrable refuge for criminals is increasingly out of date.
Operation HAECHI VI, which Interpol says ran from April through August 2025, combined traditional investigative legwork with on-chain analytics and real-time payment freezes. Authorities reported the blocking of more than 68,000 bank accounts and the freezing of close to 400 crypto wallets. From the set of digital addresses that were frozen, investigators were able to recover roughly $16 million in crypto directly — an amount that underscores both the value of on-chain traceability and the practical hurdles in turning frozen digital holdings into usable restitution.
Interpol’s public statements framed the operation as evidence that international cooperation works. “Many people believe that funds lost to fraud and scams are often irretrievable,” said Theos Badege, Director pro tempore of Interpol’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre. “The outcomes of HAECHI operations demonstrate that recovery is indeed possible.” That optimism is backed by a string of concrete outcomes reported by member countries: arrests, asset freezes, and the unpicking of laundering chains that routing proceeds through exchanges, mixers and fiat banking corridors.
The cases uncovered by HAECHI VI read like a catalogue of the internet’s most harmful scams. Law-enforcement partners reported dismantling networks running romance scams that coax victims into handing over savings; business-email compromise schemes that tricked corporations into wiring millions to fraudulent accounts; and investment fraud rings that used fake credentials and cloned sites to siphon deposits. In Portugal, investigators said they arrested dozens of suspects connected to a scheme that redirected social-security payments intended for vulnerable families. Elsewhere, authorities tracked transfers tied to professionalised cybercrime groups with global footprints.
Crucially, the operation exposed how criminal enterprises now orchestrate hybrid campaigns that link off-chain fraud and on-chain laundering. Attackers often begin with social-engineering or phishing to steal credentials or convince victims to transfer funds. From there, funds are rapidly mixed, sliced, bridged across chains and converted into stablecoins or other tokens — all designed to obfuscate the money trail. HAECHI VI’s success came from combining old-fashioned financial subpoenas and cooperative policing with modern blockchain tracing tools that map fund flows across wallets and services.
That said, the operation also illustrated the limits of recovery. Interpol’s reported $97 million in crypto seizures sits inside a larger tally of $439 million in recovered assets — and Interpol estimates that global crypto-enabled crime last year involved tens of billions of dollars. Converting seized crypto into funds that can be returned to victims or used in prosecutions involves legal hurdles, freezing orders across jurisdictions, competing claims from creditors, and at times the unwillingness of some exchanges to cooperate quickly. In many cases, the bulk of criminal proceeds are already spent, transferred through opaque intermediaries, or held in jurisdictions without fast mutual-legal-assistance processes.
Beyond reimbursement, Operation HAECHI VI carries symbolic and practical weight for the broader crypto ecosystem. For regulators and compliant businesses, the message is constructive: improved enforcement reduces the profitability of scams and raises the cost for platforms that fail to implement robust anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) controls. For illicit actors, the operation sends a different signal — namely that anonymity is not an impenetrable shield and that sophisticated tracing can follow value with surprising speed.
The operation also highlighted specific technical tools and cooperative frameworks that are becoming more central to modern policing. Interpol’s I-GRIP system — an instrument for rapidly freezing suspicious payment flows — was cited as pivotal in several cases. So too were publicly available blockchain analytics platforms, which investigators used to build case narratives and to identify suspect clusters of addresses for coordinated action. These capabilities, combined with traditional criminal-investigative powers, gave authorities a rare mix of speed and reach.
Industry reaction to the seizures has been muted but pragmatic. Compliance teams at reputable exchanges and custodians saw the operation as validation that KYC and sanction screening are not optional compliance niceties but core risk controls. At the same time, privacy advocates warned against overreach; they argued that aggressive freezing powers can risk ensnaring innocent users unless clear standards of proof and due process are observed. Both positions underline a delicate policy trade-off: enforcement that is fast and effective, but also fair and legally robust.
For victims, HAECHI VI brings a mix of relief and caution. Some restitution is now possible in cases where funds were identified and recovered, but many victims will still face long waits and uncertain outcomes. The practical reality is that even well-coordinated international operations return only a fraction of stolen value in the near term. That does not make the operation any less valuable — indeed, every seizure and arrest reduces the incentives for future fraud — but it does temper expectations about wholesale recovery.
Looking ahead, several consequences seem likely. First, we should expect more multinational operations of this kind: Interpol and national agencies have shown they can coordinate across time zones and legal systems to target fast-moving digital crime. Second, exchanges and on-ramp providers will encounter rising regulatory pressure to harden AML controls and to cooperate quickly with law enforcement. Third, cross-chain mixers and decentralised services that currently frustrate tracing efforts will be higher on enforcement agendas as authorities press for better transparency and cooperation.
Finally, the operation tightens the feedback loop between tech and enforcement. As blockchain analytics become more sophisticated, criminals will adapt; as criminals adapt, law-enforcement techniques will refine in turn. That dynamic suggests a future in which the crypto ecosystem is not a lawless frontier but a contested space where illicit profits are harder to hide and where trustable platforms — those that invest in compliance and transparency — gain a lasting competitive advantage.
Operation HAECHI VI will not end crypto-enabled crime, but it has changed the terms of the contest. By demonstrating that authorities can trace, freeze and sometimes recover sophisticated laundering chains across dozens of jurisdictions, Interpol has underlined that cooperation — not isolation — is the blunt instrument most likely to blunt the incentive for online financial crime. For an industry still fighting for mainstream legitimacy, that is a development worth noting.