Speed and intel-sharing key to disrupting global scam networks, officials say

In 2024, German cybercrime investigators tracking a ransomware operation discovered something urgent: the criminals were about to strike a company in Singapore. Rather than wait for official diplomatic channels to process the warning—a path that could have taken hours or days—the Bavarian officers sent a WhatsApp message to their contacts at Singapore Police Force. Fifteen minutes later, Singaporean officers called back to coordinate. Within that same window, police arrived at the company's premises, disrupted the encryption attempt, and saved the servers from damage. Four Russian nationals were arrested in Thailand for their role in the scheme, which had targeted high-value victims across Europe and beyond. Twenty-seven servers connected to the criminal network were dismantled. The operation involved cooperation from Singapore, Thailand, and the UK.

This incident, recounted at Singapore International Cyber Week 2026, became the centerpiece of a broader conversation about how law enforcement must operate in an era of borderless crime. Thomas Goger, deputy director of Germany's Bavarian Central Office for the Prosecution of Cybercrime, put it plainly: information sharing need not be complicated, but authorities must be willing to move faster than bureaucracy typically allows. Speed, he and other panelists agreed, is not a luxury—it is the difference between prevention and catastrophe.

The scale of the problem justifies the urgency. Across 42 countries, scams have cost victims an estimated $442 billion. Singapore alone has seen more than $4 billion vanish to scammers since 2019. In the first half of 2026, the figure was $410.6 million, a decline from $500.2 million in the same period the year before, but the total for all of 2025 reached $913.1 million. These are not abstract numbers—they represent money taken from people's savings, businesses disrupted, lives derailed.

Steve Rodhouse, director-general of threats at the UK National Crime Agency, described a recent operation that illustrated what coordinated speed could accomplish. The UK agency, Meta, the FBI, ten nations, and fifteen technology firms converged on West Africa to dismantle scam compounds. Ghanaian and Nigerian authorities positioned themselves to move on the ground. As intelligence flowed in real time—confirmation that money was moving, locations pinpointed as active—officers raided compounds and seized phones, which became repositories of further evidence. The result: 3.7 million accounts and entities created by scammers were taken offline. Rodhouse emphasized that the power lay not just in the intelligence itself but in the willingness of agencies to share access and act on what they learned together.

Chee Ching Yuin, assistant director of investigations at Singapore Police Force, underscored that each jurisdiction holds only a fragment of the full picture. Singapore collects reports and intelligence from its own victims and partners with industry to develop solutions. When those solutions can be exported and adapted elsewhere, the benefit multiplies across borders. The conversation at Cyber Week included representatives from Interpol, Europol, the Thai Central Investigation Bureau, and others—a recognition that no single country can solve this alone.

The political dimension has sharpened. In October 2026, Singapore's Senior Minister K. Shanmugam signaled that the government would pursue tougher laws for young scam mules, arguing that lenient sentences only encourage criminal networks to recruit more youth. The calculation is straightforward: if penalties are light, the supply of willing participants grows. Harder sentences, the logic goes, disrupt that recruitment pipeline.

What emerges from these conversations is a picture of law enforcement learning to operate at the speed of the threat. The ransomware group in 2024 moved fast; German and Singaporean police moved faster. The scam compounds in West Africa operated across multiple countries; ten nations and fifteen firms coordinated to shut them down. The old model—formal requests, official channels, weeks of processing—cannot compete with criminals who operate in minutes. The new model demands trust, informal channels when they work, and a willingness to share not just information but access and authority. Whether that model can scale fast enough to match the growth of global scam networks remains the question hanging over the conversation.