India may soon prepare a draft New law to criminalize “digital arrest” The scam, the government told the Supreme Court on Tuesday, came as the apex court stressed on asset attachment powers to deal with the fraud and a standalone offense that has at least amounted to extortion. ₹Rs 3,000 crore from Indians.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta’s disclosure, along with Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s call for special legal provisions, marks the sharpest increase so far in 12 months in the judicial response to a category of cyber crime that impersonates the police, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Enforcement Directorate or the Customs Department and keeps victims – many of whom are elderly – on constant video calls until they hand over their money.
Also read: Senior citizens trapped in cyber fraud consider real policemen to be fraudsters.
scale
Indians lost ₹According to data presented in Parliament in July 2025 by Minister of State for Home Bandi Sanjay Kumar, cyber frauds of all types increased by Rs 22,845.73 crore in 2024, which is 206% more than the previous year.
Data from the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal and Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System shows that there were more than 2.2 million cyber crime incidents in the year, of which 85% of the cases were related to online financial fraud.
Within that universe, digital arrests are a small but disproportionately high-value piece. The Home Ministry and CBI had told this to the Supreme Court in a sealed cover report on November 3 last year. ₹Rs 3,000 crore was extorted through fraud alone. The bench then said the problem was “much greater than we thought” and needed to be “vigorously addressed”.
Personal cases run to seven and eight digits:
Ambala, October 2025: A 73 year old woman was forced to transfer ₹The fraudsters, posing as CBI officers, committed a fraud of Rs 1 crore by threatening to confiscate their properties by using fake Supreme Court orders with fake signatures. On October 17, the apex court took suo motu cognizance of his letter to the Chief Justice.
New Delhi, at the end of 2025: A 73-year-old woman was defrauded over advocate-on-record in the Supreme Court ₹The Supreme Court Advocates on Record Association, intervening in the proceedings, told the apex court that a similar impersonation scam involving Rs 3 crore was involved.
Rajasthan, three months to April 2025: A resident was kept under digital arrest for more than three months and extorted a total of 42 times ₹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 put under digital arrest for over a fortnight and forced to relocate ₹Rs 14.85 crore siphoned off into multiple bank accounts in one of the largest single-victim digital arrest frauds recorded in the capital. The fraudsters posed as telecom executives and police officers and accused the couple of money laundering.
mechanics
The scam follows a defined sequence:
Call. The fraudsters reach the targets through pre-recorded messages or direct calls, posing as officials of the CBI, Enforcement Directorate, Customs, courts or state police.
Video change. Victims are taken to a video call with a staged “police station” background, shown fake first information reports, suspect lists or arrest warrants, and told that they are being investigated for crimes such as money laundering, drug trafficking or terrorism.
“Arrest”. Victims are instructed to stay on the line – a “digital arrest” – and transfer money for “verification.” In a status report filed for the February hearing, MHA officials told the Supreme Court that victims are usually kept on continuous video calls for hours, effectively cutting them off from family, banks and the police.
Technical scaffolding can sometimes be quite sophisticated.
In the Delhi crackdown announced in January, calls originating in Cambodia were routed to India using illegal SIMBOX devices, which convert international calls into domestic-looking calls through Indian SIM cards.
The syndicate exploited low-frequency 2G networks, rotated International Mobile Equipment Identification numbers to disguise the devices, and merged multiple SIMboxes so that the same caller was calling from different Indian cities within a day.
Forensic analysis with the National Cyber Forensic Laboratory and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Center (I4C) detected more than 5,000 compromised IMEI numbers and around 20,000 SIM cards in the module.
Also read: Digital arrest spike offsets decline in cyber crime in 2024
international series
Investigators describe a supply chain that spanned multiple jurisdictions. For example, areas such as Cambodia serve as training and recruitment grounds; While citizens of other countries – in January’s case, a Chinese citizen was involved – supply and configure the SIMBOX hardware. There are others who act as operators to finance and direct the installation of such equipment within India.
A Taiwanese national was arrested at Delhi’s international airport on December 21 last year and investigators linked him to an organized crime network, allegedly led by a gangster with a history of kidnapping for ransom, large-scale fraud and money laundering across the country.
Fueling the operation is a parallel human-trafficking economy. Hundreds of Indians were lured to Southeast Asia with the promise of jobs in the IT sector, then forced to work inside strong scam complexes. Among the more than 1,000 people who fled KK Park in Myanmar’s Myawaddy district following the controversial junta raid on October 19 last year, 399 were Indians – the largest single nationality group, Thailand’s Tak provincial office said at the time.
About 500 of them, most of whom were identified by Indian authorities as trafficking victims, were later repatriated. This was followed by the return of 549 Indians from the earlier action on the Myanmar-Thailand border in March 2025.
Also read: Group says there are still 5,300 victims in online scam centers near the Thai-Myanmar border
Response, so far
India’s response has followed multiple tracks. The Supreme Court took suo motu cognizance on 17 October and in the hearing on 3 November said that this incident needs to be dealt with strictly.
An inter-departmental committee chaired by Special Secretary (Internal Security), Ministry of Home Affairs, comprising officials from the ministries of Electronics and Information Technology, Telecommunications, External Affairs, Reserve Bank of India, National Investigation Agency, Delhi Police and I4C was constituted on December 26 last year and meets fortnightly.
The CBI has since been designated as the nodal agency for high-value cases. MeitY has held a round of consultations with Google, WhatsApp, Telegram and Microsoft on platform-level responses.
Other pieces have moved in parallel. The Telecom (Telecom Cyber Security) Amendment Rules, notified on October 22 last year, bring messaging and payment apps using mobile numbers under the same regulatory framework as licensed telecom operators, and require a check 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 based on risk level.
Why the new law?
The bench hearing the case – comprising Chief Justice Kant, Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana – said the existing equipment was not fit. Section 66D of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which covers fraud by impersonation, was written before deepfakes and staged video interrogations; The court said on Tuesday that it may need to be rewritten. The provisions of extortion and dacoity under the Indian Judicial Code describe the conduct but were not designed for it. Regulatory oversight of the enabling infrastructure rests with various arms of the state – RBI for banks, MeitY for platforms, DoT for SIM issuance, MHA for enforcement.
The Chief Justice suggested that a single statutory body may be needed to coordinate the investigations that are currently being conducted “separately on different fronts”. He said prima facie findings of involvement should lead to confiscation of all movable and immovable properties. He told the government, “We know you have the equipment to fight. We want you to chisel your equipment.”
This matter will be heard again on Wednesday.
