What happened
Operation Eagle Sweep, announced by the FBI and Justice Department on March 30, 2022, was a three-month coordinated action against business email compromise networks. It produced 65 arrests, including 12 in Nigeria, eight in South Africa, two in Canada and one in Cambodia, with parallel operations by Australia, Japan and Nigeria. The targeted actors were linked to more than 500 U.S. victims and over $51 million in losses. Cases included a Houston laundering network that moved at least $4.5 million to Nigeria.
How the deception worked
The disrupted crews used compromised or spoofed business email accounts to insert themselves into payment flows, then requested wires or changed the banking details on invoices, closings and payroll so victims paid criminals instead of counterparties. The same organizations also targeted individuals, especially real estate purchasers and elderly victims, using romance and advance-fee variants that share the same laundering back end. Proceeds were collected in U.S.-based mule accounts, often opened with stolen or synthetic identities, and forwarded to Nigeria and other destinations. Enforcement paired arrests of the fraud operators with prosecutions of the laundering cells to reduce the networks' ability to cash out.
AI involvement · No AI reported
No AI or synthetic media reported.
The control that would have caught it· our reading, not a claim from the sources
Because the same infrastructure serves corporate and consumer variants, banks and businesses benefit most from beneficiary-account verification and rapid kill-chain reporting rather than victim-type-specific controls.
Sources (1)
This entry summarises public reporting. It is not a legal finding, and details can change as investigations conclude. Found an error? Send a correction.