The International Police (Interpol) has successfully arrested a 37-year-old Nigerian man suspected of being the mastermind behind a transnational cybercrime syndicate called SilverTerrier. The as of yet unidentified suspect was whisked away at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos by the Cybercrime Unit of the Nigerian Police Force (NPF) after an 11-month investigation managed to track him down.
In a statement made on Wednesday, Interpol stated that the arrest and subsequent destabilization of SilverTerrier had dealt a major blow to the group which has been linked to several cases of Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams as well as a truly massive amount of phishing attacks. They disclosed that the arrest had been the result of an international operation requiring the aid and expertise of officials in four continents and all of it supervised and coordinated by the recently formed Africa Operations Desk whose domain lies within Interpol’s Cybercrime Directorate. All of this enabled them to track down the suspect whose activities are believed to have started as far back as 2015 and who had initially fled arrest previously in 2021. In total, the group is believed to have attacked over 500,000 companies since they began operations, with those companies spanning more than 150 countries.
The arrest has been termed as only the latest in Interpol’s as well as other international security agencies’ efforts to counter criminal activities. Efforts noted to have borne fruit in the arrest of the leader and eleven other members of the SilverTerrier group.
