Over 20 people have been arrested in the US, UK and the Netherlands in what appears to be a coordinated crackdown on suspected members of hacking group, Anonymous.

Most of the arrests were in the the US, where the authorities took 16 people into custody. Fourteen of these where charged with carrying out distributed denial of service (DoS) attacks against payments website, PayPal. The attacks were widely reported in December last year, when Anonymous sought to avenge Wikileaks after PayPal and Mastercard stop taking payments for the leak organisation.

The fourteen were charged with having "intentionally caused damage without authorisation to protected computers at PayPal", through the use of a program called the Low Orbit Ion Cannon – a javascript application which allows DoS attacks to be carried out from a web browser.

One teenager was arrested in London on suspicion of breaching the Computer Misuse Act, and was in custody at a central London police station this morning.

"Officers from the Met’s Police Computer e-Crime Unit yesterday, 19 July, arrested a 16-year-old male. He was arrested in south London. Computer equipment was taken from the address for analysis," the London Metropolitan Police said in a statement.

The Met also confirmed that the operation had be carried out jointly with forces around the world. "The Met has been cooperating with the FBI as well as German and Dutch authorities," a Met spokesperson said.

The Dutch National Police Agency arrested four individuals last night for alleged related cyber crimes.

The operation in the US saw more than 35 search warrants executed across ten states as part of an ongoing investigation into the activities of Anonymous.