India could soon draft a new law to criminalise “digital arrest” scams, the government told the Supreme Court on Tuesday, as the top court pushed for asset attachment powers and a standalone offence to tackle a fraud that has extorted at least ₹3,000 crore from Indians.
Event Context
The disclosure by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, together with Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s call for special legal provisions, marks the sharpest escalation yet in a 12-month judicial response to a category of cybercrime that impersonates police, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Enforcement Directorate or customs to hold victims — many of them elderly — on continuous video calls until they surrender their money.
Also read: Senior citizen caught in cyber con mistakes real cops for fraudsters
Rajasthan, three months to April 2025: A resident was held under digital arrest for over three months and extorted 42 times, totalling ₹7.67 crore, before the CBI took over the case under “Operation Chakra-V” and arrested four operatives in Mumbai and Moradabad.
New Delhi, over two weeks in December-January: An elderly NRI doctor couple was held under digital arrest for more than a fortnight and coerced into transferring ₹14.85 crore to multiple bank accounts, in one of the largest single-victim digital arrest frauds recorded in the capital. The fraudsters posed as telecom officials and police officers and accused the couple of money laundering.
The scam follows a defined sequence:
The call. Fraudsters reach the target through pre-recorded messages or direct calls, impersonating officers of the CBI, Enforcement Directorate, customs, courts or state police.
The video shift. Victims are moved to a video call with a staged “police station” backdrop, shown fake First Information Reports, suspect lists or arrest warrants, and told they are being investigated for offences such as money laundering, drug trafficking or terrorism.
The “arrest”. Victims are instructed to remain on the line — the “digital arrest” — and to transfer funds for “verification”. MHA officials told the Supreme Court, in the status report filed for a February hearing, that victims are typically kept on continuous video calls for hours, effectively cut off from family, banks and the police.
The technical scaffolding can at times be significantly sophisticated.
In a Delhi crackdown announced in January, calls originating in Cambodia were routed into India using illegal SIMBOX devices, which convert international calls into domestic-looking ones by pushing them through Indian SIM cards.
Forensic analysis with the National Cyber Forensic Laboratory and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) traced over 5,000 compromised IMEI numbers and around 20,000 SIM cards to the module.
Also read: Digital arrest spike stalled cybercrime dip in 2024
Investigators describe a supply chain that spans several jurisdictions. For instance, regions such as Cambodia serve as a training and recruitment ground; while nationals from others countries – in the January case, a Chinese national was involved — supply and configure SIMBOX hardware. There are yet others who act as handlers to fund and direct installation of such devices inside India.
A Taiwanese national was arrested at Delhi’s international airport on December 21 last year and was linked by investigators to an organised crime network allegedly headed by a gangster with a history of kidnapping for ransom, large-scale fraud and money laundering across countries.
Around 500 of them, most identified by Indian officials as trafficking victims, were subsequently repatriated. That followed the return of 549 Indians in March 2025 from an earlier crackdown along the Myanmar-Thailand border.
Also read: Online scam centres near Thai-Myanmar border still holding 5,300 victims, group says
India’s answer has run on multiple tracks. The Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance on October 17 and, at the November 3 hearing, said the phenomenon required to be met with an “iron hand”.
An Inter-Departmental Committee chaired by the MHA’s Special Secretary (Internal Security) was constituted on December 26 last year, drawing officers from the Ministries of Electronics and Information Technology, Telecommunications, External Affairs, the Reserve Bank of India, the National Investigation Agency, Delhi Police and I4C, and meets fortnightly.
Other pieces have moved in parallel. The Telecommunications (Telecom Cyber Security) Amendment Rules, notified on October 22 last year, brought messaging and payment apps that use mobile numbers under the same regulatory framework as licensed telecom operators, and required checks against a blacklisted-device database before the sale of used phones.
In June 2025, the RBI directed all banks to integrate the Department of Telecommunications’ Financial Fraud Risk Indicator, which classifies flagged mobile numbers by risk tier.
The bench hearing the matter — Chief Justice Kant, with justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana — said existing tools do not fit. Section 66D of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which covers cheating by impersonation, was written before deepfakes and staged video interrogations; the court on Tuesday said it may itself need to be rewritten. Extortion and dacoity provisions under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita describe the conduct but were not designed for it. Regulatory oversight of the enabling infrastructure sits with different arms of the state — RBI for banks, MeitY for platforms, DoT for SIM issuance, MHA for enforcement.
The Chief Justice suggested a single statutory body might be needed to coordinate what is currently examined “separately at various fronts”. Prima facie findings of involvement, he said, should trigger the freezing of all movable and immovable assets. “We know that you have tools to fight with. We want you to chisel your tools,” he told the government.
Team Analysis
Feeding the operation is a parallel human-trafficking economy. Hundreds of Indians have been lured to Southeast Asia with promises of IT-sector jobs, then forced to work inside fortified scam compounds. Of the more than 1,000 people who fled KK Park in Myanmar’s Myawaddy district after a disputed junta raid on October 19 last year, 399 were Indians — the largest single nationality group, Thailand’s Tak provincial office said at the time.
Match Outlook
The syndicate exploited low-frequency 2G networks, rotated International Mobile Equipment Identity numbers to disguise devices, and merged multiple SIMBOXes so that a single caller could appear to be operating from different Indian cities within a day.
The matter will be heard again on Wednesday.
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Indians lost ₹22,845.73 crore to cyber fraud of all kinds in 2024, a 206% jump from the previous year, according to data tabled in Parliament in July 2025 by Minister of State for Home Bandi Sanjay Kumar.
The figures, drawn from the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal and the Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System, showed over 2.2 million cybercrime incidents in the year, with 85% of cases involving online financial fraud.
Within that universe, digital arrest is a small but disproportionately high-value slice. The Ministry of Home Affairs and the CBI told the Supreme Court in a sealed-cover report on November 3 last year that about ₹3,000 crore had been extorted through the fraud alone. The bench then said the problem was “more than what we thought” and needed to be met with an “iron hand”.
Individual cases run to seven and eight figures:
Ambala, October 2025: A 73-year-old woman was coerced to transfer over ₹1 crore by fraudsters posing as CBI officials, who threatened her with property seizure using fake Supreme Court orders bearing forged signatures. Her letter to the Chief Justice triggered the top court’s suo motu cognisance on October 17.
New Delhi, late 2025: A 73-year-old woman advocate-on-record at the Supreme Court was duped of more than ₹3 crore in a similar impersonation scam, the Supreme Court Advocates on Record Association told the top court while intervening in the proceedings.
