Meta says it has launched one of its largest recent crackdowns on organized scam-center activity, disabling more than 150,000 accounts connected to criminal networks operating out of Southeast Asia. The company framed the move as a major international disruption effort, carried out with support from multiple law enforcement agencies.
In its March announcement, Meta said its investigators worked alongside the Royal Thai Police, the FBI, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Scam Center Strike Force, as well as other partners. The goal: disrupt industrialized scam operations that use social platforms to find victims, build trust, and then push conversations into private messages where the real fraud begins.
Meta: Scam centers ran romance, crypto, job, and impersonation schemes
According to Meta, the scam-center networks targeted people in the United States, the United Kingdom, and countries across Asia and the Pacific region. The company said these groups were linked to a wide range of online scams, including romance fraud, investment and cryptocurrency schemes, fake job offers, and other impersonation tactics. A common pattern, Meta noted, is using public-facing accounts to bait targets and then moving them quickly to private messaging apps or one-on-one chats to pressure them into sending money or sharing sensitive information.
Based on intelligence shared by law enforcement, Meta said it removed more than 150,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts that were involved in or supporting these scam-center operations. As part of the wider effort, Thailand’s Royal Thai Police Anti-Cyber Scam Center reportedly arrested 21 people.
A bigger disruption than the previous joint operation
Meta described the March action as its second joint “disruption week” since December 2025. In that earlier operation, the company said it removed around 59,000 accounts tied to similar scam-center activity. By comparison, this latest sweep is far larger, which Meta is using to underline how cross-border cooperation is intensifying—and how quickly these networks can multiply when left unchecked.
The company also said the effort included support from agencies across the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia. That international involvement matters because scam-center networks based in areas such as Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar often operate across borders, target victims worldwide, and are frequently linked to forced labor and trafficking allegations. In other words, this isn’t a local cybercrime issue—it’s a global, organized industry.
New anti-scam features across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp
Alongside the account takedowns, Meta pointed to new anti-scam tools it’s rolling out to help users spot red flags earlier. In a separate March 2026 update, the company said it has introduced warnings for suspicious friend requests on Facebook, stronger scam alerts inside Messenger, and device-linking warnings on WhatsApp designed to reduce account hijacking and social engineering attempts.
Meta also shared broader figures to show the scale of the problem. The company said it removed more than 159 million scam ads in 2025 and took down 10.9 million Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with criminal scam centers during that same year.
Why this matters for everyday users
Meta’s latest numbers highlight a reality of modern online fraud: major social platforms can be used both to spread scams and to stop them, depending on how fast bad actors are detected and removed. The 150,000-account takedown is being positioned as proof that coordinated action between platforms and law enforcement can disrupt scam networks at scale—even as romance scams, crypto fraud, fake job offers, and impersonation schemes continue to evolve.
For users, the takeaway is simple: be cautious with unexpected friend requests, messages that escalate quickly to private chats, and any conversation that turns to money, cryptocurrency, “investment opportunities,” or urgent requests for personal information. These are still the most common pathways scam centers use to turn a casual message into a costly loss.
