Spacex Starlink Gen3 recovered from Zambia's scam facility, 79 apprehended including foreign nationals
79 suspects were apprehended in a transnational cybercrime scam centre operating in Lusaka, Zambia. Multiple Starlink terminals were seized in the operations. Authorities have indicated that the illegal setup was a national security threat. 11 Chinese nationals were apprehended in the operation.
Lusaka, Zambia: On 23 August 2026, a joint team from the Zambia Police Service, the Drug Enforcement Commission, the Department of Immigration and the Zambia Cyber Security Agency entered a property at Evana Estates in New Kasama, Lusaka, and apprehended 79 people of nine nationalities.
5 Starlink terminals for 79 seats. Roughly one uplink per sixteen operators. That ratio is too thin for video-heavy work and entirely adequate for what scam operations actually consume: messaging clients, browser sessions, social platforms, remote desktop, crypto wallets and voice. Text and web traffic per seat is small; the aggregate is well within what a handful of LEO terminals deliver. Whoever provisioned this understood the workload.
140 phones against 10 new SIM cards. The phones outnumber the people by nearly two to one, while fresh local SIMs are almost absent. That asymmetry points toward device pools running app-based and account-based personas rather than freshly registered local mobile identities, consistent with operations that source their reachable identities online rather than at a Zambian SIM registration desk.
Investigators also recovered K21,490, US$10,450 and assorted foreign currency, and 75 passports for 69 foreign nationals, Those apprehended comprise thirty-five (35) Ugandans, eleven (11) Chinese, ten (10) Zambians, eight ( Kenyans, six (6) Ghanaians, five (5) Liberians, two (2) Burundians, one (1) Chadian and one (1) Zimbabwean national. Police has confirmed the angle of Human Trafficking and forced scam operations in their press note.
National Security Threat
DEC PRO Allan Tamba said specialized digital forensics revealed a clandestine computer laboratory operating without legal authority, aimed at compromising government information systems, including those linked to the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ). They cited the Penal Code, State Security Act and Cyber Crimes Act.
Authorities said some foreign nationals may have been recruited under deceptive circumstances with restricted freedom of movement, so human trafficking / labour exploitation cannot be ruled out. Immigration confirmed 6 Ugandans were staying illegally.
Why Starlink is preferred in illegal online activites?
A Starlink terminal removes every one of those layers at once. There is no local install record, no local subscriber file, no local circuit to cut, no local entity to serve process on, and no domestic operator whose monitoring would flag the traffic profile. What remains is a portable box, a foreign account, and a company headquartered on another continent.
The second-order effect is where this gets genuinely difficult for investigators and for the platforms scam operations abuse.
Lengthy Legal process . Because the accountable entity is a US company, subscriber identification runs through mutual legal assistance or US process rather than a domestic production order. Compare timelines: a Zambian order on a Zambian ISP resolves in days; an MLAT request measures in months. For an operation that relocates on a tip-off, that differential is the whole game.
Starlink has held a ZICTA licence since June 2023. MTN Zambia became an authorised reseller in 2025 and completed Africa's first Starlink Direct-to-Cell field test in March 2026. New Kasama is a serviced suburb of the capital, not an ungoverned border zone. Fibre and mobile broadband are available there.
Investigations are ongoing, all 79 remain in custody while the task force tries to identify masterminds and links to other networks within and outside Zambia.