Lucknow, The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court has ruled that investigating agencies cannot impose a blanket debit freeze on a person’s bank account when the alleged cybercrime transaction involves a specific amount.
He claimed that the freezing originated from a cybercrime investigation in Karnataka after ₹ 36,000 was allegedly credited into his Bandhan Bank account in a disputed transaction. The court relied on its January 19 judgment in Khalsa Medical Store vs RBI, in which it had held that a notice seeking freezing of a bank account in a cybercrime case should specify the amount for which a lien was sought. The petitioner, a construction material supplier, had approached the court after his accounts with several banks, including Bandhan Bank, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank, were frozen. A blanket direction to block or suspend an entire account, the court had held, could not ordinarily be sustained. The court took note of the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Standard Operating Procedure governing grievances relating to account seizures and suspension of digital banking services under the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal -Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System .
The court said the power to freeze bank accounts during a cybercrime investigation cannot be treated as an unfettered power to bring an individual’s entire financial life and legitimate business activity to a standstill. The court said the mechanism must provide an effective and time-bound remedy to account holders whose banking facilities have been suspended, while protecting the amount actually under investigation.
