Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): The sting of ‘Digital Arrest’ is targeted at the well-educated and those who have a good bank balance. Around 35 cases of ‘digital arrest’ have been reported in the state so far, and people have lost their life’s earnings to these fraudsters, said officials here on Monday.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi alerted people about ‘digital arrest,’ pointing out that no such thing exists.
ADG (Cyber) Yogesh Deshmukh said, “It’s a cybercrime, and such cases have been on the rise for the past year and a half. Fraudsters posing as law enforcement officials of various agencies, including the state police (particularly crime branch), CBI, ED, Income Tax, Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and even the Supreme Court, put victims under immense mental stress, accusing them of knowingly or unknowingly indulging in a major crime, like human trafficking, narcotics smuggling/trafficking, or money laundering. Often these fraudsters say that their close relative is under arrest for the above-mentioned crimes.”
The cyber crime branch had issued an advisory regarding the fake digital arrest.
The cases:
Last week, in the state’s financial capital Indore, a scientist from the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT-Indore) lost his entire savings of Rs 71.33 lakh—set aside for his daughter’s marriage—after he and his wife were placed under ‘digital arrest’ in his house for six long days with small breaks in between.
Earlier in Gwalior, a retired government woman teacher was ‘arrested,’ and the fraudsters looted Rs 51 lakh. One more woman was cheated of Rs 38 lakh, and one advocate also fell victim to these scamsters.
Indore Police’s crime branch additional SP (ASP-Crime) Rajesh Dandotiya said that the crime branch has made major progress in such cases. “Out of the 31 cases reported to us since February 2024, a total sum of Rs 3 crore has been swindled after digital arrests. Of them, over Rs 70 lakh has been recovered by timely freezing the master accounts and their subsequent layers in which the victims were coaxed to deposit their money.
In one case pertaining to a female IT professional, Rs 6 lakh out of the swindled Rs 12 lakh has been recovered, following the arrest of a young graduate from Jhalawar (Rajasthan),” informed Dandotiya. “We’ve also helped the Rajasthan Police successfully crack a similar case of Rs 16 lakh fraud by arresting two men from Indore,” he added.
The Indore crime branch’s multiple teams have already zeroed in on multiple bank accounts used by various scamsters to park the ill-gotten wealth, and some of the SIM cards (phone numbers) employed for digital arrests. These accounts are spread across multiple states, including Odisha, West Bengal, Jharkhand, UP, Delhi, Maharashtra (particularly Mumbai and Pune), and Telangana (especially Hyderabad).
