#FactCheck - Viral Photo of Dilapidated Bridge Misattributed to Kerala, Originally from Bangladesh

Introduction

For two decades, cybercrime enforcement was built around a simple assumption: criminals hide behind screens, but they still operate mostly within reachable borders. That assumption has collapsed. Today's fraud economy runs through industrial-scale scam compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia, laundering networks spanning a dozen jurisdictions, and trafficked labour forced to defraud victims thousands of miles away. INTERPOL's own trend reporting has tracked victims from more than 60 countries pulled into scam operations that now stretch well beyond Southeast Asia into Africa, the Gulf, and Latin America. Global losses from this activity are estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and the networks rebuild faster than any single government can dismantle them.

A Threat That Outran the Old Playbook

The mismatch is the real story behind a wave of policy moves in 2025 and 2026. The August 12, 2026 U.S. National Security Presidential Memorandum authorising vetted private companies to conduct government-supervised offensive cyber operations against transnational criminal organisations is one data point in that wave, not the whole story. Washington's move sits alongside a broader, still-unfinished experiment: can the international system build cooperative machinery fast enough to match a threat that treats borders as an inconvenience rather than a barrier?

Three Tracks of International Response

Three distinct but overlapping tracks have emerged.

The treaty: The most consequential recent development is the UN Convention against Cybercrime, adopted by the General Assembly in December 2024 and opened for signature in Hanoi in October 2025, where 71 states and the EU signed on. It is the first comprehensive global treaty addressing cybercrime and cross-border evidence sharing, building on the older Budapest Convention framework that has anchored cooperation since 2004. The Hanoi Convention needs 40 ratifications to enter into force; as of mid-2026, only three states (Qatar, Azerbaijan, and Vietnam) had ratified it, and human rights groups continue to warn that its broad scope could be used by authoritarian governments to justify surveillance and cross-border data requests dressed up as cybercrime cooperation. The treaty's fate will hinge on a Conference of States Parties process now being negotiated, where democracies are pushing for genuine multi-stakeholder oversight rather than a rubber stamp.

The operational track: While treaty diplomacy moves slowly, police-to-police cooperation has scaled up dramatically. INTERPOL's Operation First Light, now an annual standing initiative, illustrates the trajectory: its 2026 iteration spanned January to April, generated over 5,800 arrests and roughly $293 million in intercepted funds, and made heavy use of the Global Rapid Intervention of Payments mechanism to freeze illicit transfers before they disappeared into crypto wallets. A parallel operation led by Dubai Police with the FBI and Chinese authorities dismantled nine pig-butchering compounds across Myanmar, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Thailand, seizing more than $701 million. In Europe, Europol's EMPACT framework has entered a new 2026–2029 cycle, deepening ties with Frontex, Eurojust, and regional partners like Ameripol and the EL PACTTO programme in Latin America, effectively building a lattice of standing coordination bodies rather than one-off task forces. These operations demonstrate real capacity, but they also expose the "whack-a-mole" problem: raided compounds in Myanmar's Myawaddy region simply relocated, reconnected via satellite internet, and resumed operations within weeks, according to regional reporting.

The public-private track: This is where the U.S. memorandum fits into a genuinely global pattern rather than standing alone. The United Kingdom's 2026–2029 Fraud Strategy centres on a £31 million Online Crime Centre, opening in 2026, that fuses data from the National Crime Agency, the intelligence community, and private partners across banking, telecoms, and technology into a single coordination hub building on existing arrangements like Stop Scams UK, where telecom operators and banks already share suspicious SIM and account data in near real time. In the U.S., a June 2026 joint action involving the Justice Department, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Coinbase froze $3.8 billion in cryptocurrency and disrupted 1.4 million fraud-linked accounts, showing that platform cooperation can move faster than formal treaty processes. Singapore has positioned itself as a hub for this model too, anchoring the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, which now includes ASEAN's own foundation as a member, bringing governments, banks, and tech platforms into shared intelligence loops. What distinguishes the U.S. memorandum is that it goes a step further than data-sharing: it authorises companies to take disruptive technical action, not just contribute intelligence, under a legal theory that folds them into the government's own authority under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act's law-enforcement exception.

Where the System Still Breaks Down

Despite this activity, structural gaps, like jurisdiction, are the deepest ones. Scam compounds deliberately locate in special economic zones and border regions precisely because territorial control there is contested or weak, leaving no single government with clean authority to act. ASEAN's own policy work acknowledges that nearly every stage of the regional scam value chain crosses at least one border, which is why the bloc has shifted toward standing coordination bodies like its Working Group on Anti-Online Scams rather than relying on bilateral requests.

Attribution and accountability lag behind operational tempo. Financial intelligence and blockchain analytics have improved enforcement precision, but identifying the human traffickers and financiers sitting above front-line scam operators remains slow, uneven, and dependent on political will in host countries.

Governance of the newer public-private authorities is also unsettled. Human rights advocates flag that expanding both the Hanoi Convention's surveillance-adjacent powers and unilateral hack-back authorities like the U.S. memorandum could, without careful oversight, blur the line between fighting organised fraud and enabling broader digital overreach. The U.S. memorandum's own guardrails, which are a ban on operations causing serious injury or rising to a use of force, mandatory federal sign-off, and a $1 million forfeitable bond, reflect an awareness of that risk, but its implementing procedures remain classified, and comparable transparency gaps exist in several other national programs.

The Emerging Consensus

What's notable is not any single instrument but the convergence: nearly every serious national or regional response now combines the same three ingredients deeper platform and financial-sector data sharing, standing multilateral operational coordination, and a cautious expansion of what non-state actors are permitted to do. The countries and blocs making the fastest progress, from the UK's Online Crime Centre to INTERPOL's payment-interdiction tools to ASEAN's regional information-sharing arrangement, are the ones treating cyber-enabled transnational crime as a persistent infrastructure problem rather than a series of discrete crimes to be prosecuted after the fact. Whether that convergence produces durable results or simply better-coordinated whack-a-mole will depend on the unglamorous work still ahead: ratifying treaties, writing classified rulebooks, and building the cross-border trust that lets financial and technical data move as fast as the criminals do.

Conclusion 

Transnational cybercrime has outgrown fragmented national enforcement. The emerging combination of international treaties, operational cooperation, and public-private partnerships offers a stronger response, but serious gaps in jurisdiction, accountability, and oversight remain. Ultimately, success will depend on whether states can build cooperation and safeguards capable of matching criminals’ speed, adaptability, and global reach.

Sources

• Presidential Memorandum: Expanding Capabilities to Combat Transnational Cyber-Enabled Crime — The White House
• United Nations Convention against Cybercrime — UNODC
• The Promise and Peril of the U.N. Convention Against Cybercrime — Just Security
• Moving Forward with the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime — ICCLR
• Growing threat of transnational scam centres highlighted at INTERPOL General Assembly
• Over 5,800 arrests, USD 293 million intercepted in global fraud bust — INTERPOL
• Operation First Light 2026: 276 Arrested, $701M Seized — Breached.Company

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Executive Summary
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A picture allegedly showing Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) owner Kavya Maran emotionally hugging young cricketer Vaibhav Suryavanshi has gone viral on social media. The image is being shared as a genuine photograph from a cricket-related event, with users claiming that Kavya Maran was seen embracing Vaibhav Suryavanshi. However, CyberPeace Research Wing research found the claim to be false. No credible news reports, official statements, or authentic photographs support the incident depicted in the viral image.

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Claim

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A Facebook user shared the viral image with the caption: “Kavya Maran Hug Vaibhav Suryavanshi 🥰🔥 #cricketnews #RRvsSRH” The link to the post and its screenshot are provided below.

• https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=122187674414757496&set=a.122104828004757496

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Fact Check

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During the research, we found no credible news reports, official statements, or authentic images confirming that Kavya Maran hugged Vaibhav Suryavanshi as shown in the viral picture. To further verify the image, it was analysed using AI detection tools, including Sightengine and Hive Moderation. Both tools indicated a high probability that the image was generated using Artificial Intelligence. The findings suggest that the viral photograph is not a genuine image captured at a real event but a digitally created visual.

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Conclusion

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Our research found that the viral image showing Kavya Maran emotionally hugging Vaibhav Suryavanshi is not authentic. The picture was generated using AI and does not depict a real incident.

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Introduction

On the precipice of a new domain of existence, the metaverse emerges as a digital cosmos, an expanse where the horizon is not sky, but a limitless scope for innovation and imagination. It is a sophisticated fabric woven from the threads of social interaction, leisure, and an accelerated pace of technological progression. This new reality, a virtual landscape stretching beyond the mundane encumbrances of terrestrial life, heralds an evolutionary leap where the laws of physics yield to the boundless potential inherent in our creativity. Yet, the dawn of such a frontier does not escape the spectre of an age-old adversary—financial crime—the shadow that grows in tandem with newfound opportunity, seeping into the metaverse, where crypto-assets are no longer just an alternative but the currency du jour, dazzling beacons for both legitimate pioneers and shades of illicit intent.

The metaverse, by virtue of its design, is a canvas for the digital repaint of society—a three-dimensional realm where the lines between immersive experiences and entertainment blur, intertwining with surreal intimacy within this virtual microcosm. Donning headsets like armor against the banal, individuals become avatars; digital proxies that acquire the ability to move, speak, and perform an array of actions with an ease unattainable in the physical world. Within this alternative reality, users navigate digital topographies, with experiences ranging from shopping in pixelated arcades to collaborating in virtual offices; from witnessing concerts that defy sensory limitations to constructing abodes and palaces from mere codes and clicks—an act of creation no longer beholden to physicality but to the breadth of one's ingenuity.

The Crypto Assets

The lifeblood of this virtual economy pulsates through crypto-assets. These digital tokens represent value or rights held on distributed ledgers—a technology like blockchain, which serves as both a vault and a transparent tapestry, chronicling the pathways of each digital asset. To hop onto the carousel of this economy requires a digital wallet—a storeroom and a gateway for acquisition and trade of these virtual valuables. Cryptocurrencies, with NFTs—Non-fungible Tokens—have accelerated from obscure digital curios to precious artifacts. According to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, an astonishing figure surpassing US$100 million in NFTs were usurped between July 2021 and July 2022. This rampant heist underlines their captivating allure for virtual certificates. Empowers do not just capture art, music, and gaming, but embody their very soul.

Yet, as the metaverse burgeons, so does the complexity and diversity of financial transgressions. From phishing to sophisticated fraud schemes, criminals craft insidious simulacrums of legitimate havens, aiming to drain the crypto-assets of the unwary. In the preceding year, a daunting figure rose to prominence—the vanishing of US$14 billion worth of crypto-assets, lost to the abyss of deception and duplicity. Hence, social engineering emerges from the shadows, a sort of digital chicanery that preys not upon weaknesses of the system, but upon the psychological vulnerabilities of its users—scammers adorned in the guise of authenticity, extracting trust and assets with Machiavellian precision.

The New Wave of Fincrimes 

Extending their tentacles further, perpetrators of cybercrime exploit code vulnerabilities, engage in wash trading, obscuring the trails of money laundering, meander through sanctions evasion, and even dare to fund activities that send ripples of terror across the physical and virtual divide. The intricacies of smart contracts and the decentralized nature of these worlds, designed to be bastions of innovation, morph into paths paved for misuse and exploitation. The openness of blockchain transactions, the transparency that should act as a deterrent, becomes a paradox, a double-edged sword for the law enforcement agencies tasked with delineating the networks of faceless adversaries.

Addressing financial crime in the metaverse is Herculean labour, requiring an orchestra of efforts—harmonious, synchronised—from individual users to mammoth corporations, from astute policymakers to vigilant law enforcement bodies. Users must furnish themselves with critical awareness, fortifying their minds against the siren calls that beckon impetuous decisions, spurred by the anxiety of falling behind. Enterprises, the architects and custodians of this digital realm, are impelled to collaborate with security specialists, to probe their constructs for weak seams, and to reinforce their bulwarks against the sieges of cyber onslaughts. Policymakers venture onto the tightrope walk, balancing the impetus for innovation against the gravitas of robust safeguards—a conundrum played out on the global stage, as epitomised by the European Union's strides to forge cohesive frameworks to safeguard this new vessel of human endeavour.

The Austrian Example 

Consider the case of Austria, where the tapestry of laws entwining crypto-assets spans a gamut of criminal offences, from data breaches to the complex webs of money laundering and the financing of dark enterprises. Users and corporations alike must become cartographers of local legislation, charting their ventures and vigilances within the volatile seas of the metaverse.

Upon the sands of this virtual frontier, we must not forget: that the metaverse is more than a hive of bits and bandwidth. It crystallises our collective dreams, echoes our unspoken fears, and reflects the range of our ambitions and failings. It stands as a citadel where the ever-evolving quest for progress should never stray from the compass of ethical pursuit. The cross-pollination of best practices, and the solidarity of international collaboration, are not simply tactics—they are imperatives engraved with the moral codes of stewardship, guiding us to preserve the unblemished spirit of the metaverse.

Conclusion

The clarion call of the metaverse invites us to venture into its boundless expanse, to savour its gifts of connection and innovation. Yet, on this odyssey through the pixelated constellations, we harness vigilance as our star chart, mindful of the mirage of morality that can obfuscate and lead astray. In our collective pursuit to curtail financial crime, we deploy our most formidable resource—our unity—conjuring a bastion for human ingenuity and integrity. In this, we ensure that the metaverse remains a beacon of awe, safeguarded against the shadows of transgression, and celebrated as a testament to our shared aspiration to venture beyond the realm of the possible, into the extraordinary.

References 

• https://www.wolftheiss.com/insights/financial-crime-in-the-metaverse-is-real/ 
• https://gnet-research.org/2023/08/16/meta-terror-the-threats-and-challenges-of-the-metaverse/
• https://shuftipro.com/blog/the-rising-concern-of-financial-crimes-in-the-metaverse-aml-screening-as-a-solution/

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