Crypto: $52 million seized in Madagascar, 13 scam farms dismantled

Thirteen scam farms wiped off the map. According to Agence France-Presse, Malagasy law enforcement and the American Department of Justice dismantled thirteen online fraud complexes installed on the Big Island, after two months of joint operations. Investigators blocked nearly $52 million in cryptocurrencies in a single day and seized more than 3,200 electronic devices.

One hundred and forty-eight Chinese nationals convicted of online fraud have already been transferred to China to serve their sentences.

According to AFP, these thirteen complexes all operated on the same model, mixing romantic scams, false financial investments and cryptocurrency fraud. The Department of Justice uses the term restrained, a judicial freeze which immobilizes funds while a court rules on their definitive confiscation. Investigators took away 3,200 phones and computers, enough to equip as many operators each responsible for dozens of fictitious profiles on WhatsApp and dating applications.

The process has a name in investigators' jargon, pig butchering, a literal translation from Mandarin sha zhu pan. We fatten the target for weeks through a relationship of trust, sometimes romantic, before directing them towards a fictitious investment platform then emptying their portfolio all at once. Some operators work there under duress, recruited through false job advertisements and held on site with confiscated passports.

The 148 convicts handed over to Beijing continue a campaign started two years ago by the Chinese authorities against their nationals involved in these networks. Several thousand of them had already been repatriated from Burma at the beginning of 2025, after the evacuation of the scam enclaves of Myawaddy, on the Thai border.

In a report published in April 2025, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) already described the spread of these centers out of Southeast Asia, towards Africa and South America, under pressure from the Burmese and Thai offensives. The organization estimates the annual revenues of these networks between 27 and 37 billion dollars for East and Southeast Asia alone. Madagascar, Zambia and Angola were among the new settlements spotted.

If 52 million dollars were able to be immobilized in twenty-four hours, it is precisely because the money circulated on public registers which could be consulted by any analyst. The same sums passed through the Cambodian conglomerate Huione Group, cut off from the American financial system by the Treasury in May 2025, would have left no exploitable lead. The analysis company Elliptic had estimated the flows passed through its Huione Guarantee marketplace at $27 billion.

This traceability produced in October 2025 the largest confiscation in the history of the Department of Justice, with 127,271 bitcoins seized from Chen Zhi, president of the Cambodian Prince Group, or approximately $15 billion at the time. The 52 million Malagasy people weigh little in comparison, but they come from a territory that no one monitored three years ago.