My father lost Rs 10 lakh in a digital arrest scam. Here’s how he got some money back

One evening in October, I got a text message from my mother. I had spent the day working on a story on Indians falling prey to “digital arrests” in which cyber-scamsters posing as law enforcement officials dupe people of vast sums of money.

My mother asked when I would be back from work. My father wanted to speak to me, she said.

This was most unusual. Worried about a health problem, I phoned him immediately.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Don’t tell anyone, but I have been falsely implicated in an ED-CBI case,” Papa said.

As he spoke, my heart sank. This sounded like the script of the digital arrest cases I had been reporting on, where fraudsters claiming to be officials of the police or Enforcement Directorate or Central Bureau of Investigation call people to say that they have been accused in a criminal case. They intimidate their targets enough to force them into transferring large sums of money.

The proliferation of such scams had led Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his radio show in October to warn listeners against falling for this digital crime.

“It is a scam, Papa,” I almost screamed, before my father could finish. “Please tell me you have not given them any money.”

“Rs 10 lakh,” came the reply, as I could hear my father break down over the phone. “I have lost all my savings.”

For the next two months, our family went through a dark phase.

We went about filing complaints, doing the rounds of police stations and the court, all the while talking to experts about how to get the money back. My father resigned himself to self-loathing.

I saw up close what I had reported in an earlier article – besides the monetary loss, “digital arrests” shatter their victims mentally and leave their confidence broken.

But all is not always lost.

Two months later, on December 19, I was out a reporting assignment when I got a phone call from Papa. An unexpected call, as he rarely calls me during my working hours. As I picked up, he said: “I have got back Rs 2.5 lakh, the police officials said I could get Rs 4 lakh soon.”

What should a digital arrest victim do: A personal account

My father was fortunate – but prompt action does increase your chances of retrieving some of your money. Here is what we learnt.

The first thing to do is report the crime to the investigation agencies as quickly as possible.

You need to do that by filing an online complaint on the Union home ministry’s cybercrime reporting portal.

A complaint on the portal with details of the fraudulent transaction sets off an alert in the system, which puts a freeze on the bank accounts involved in the fraud.

This is essential because after a victim transfers the money, fraudsters quickly move the amount to other accounts, making it difficult to identifying the money trail.

Experts say that tracing the money becomes difficult if the crime is not reported within 24 hours.

In our case, the complaint was filed within three hours of my father transferring
Rs 10.4 lakh to a State Bank of India account.

Reporting the fraud requires creating a login ID on the cybercrime portal. From my experience, it is advisable to create an ID even if someone has not been defrauded. This saves time if a complaint needs to be filed.

To file the complaint, victims need to submit a short description of how the fraud took place, their Aadhaar number and details of the bank transaction.

These details include the branch name and code of the bank accounts, both of the victim and the fraudster, and the two unique numbers – the transaction ID and reference ID – that are provided for every bank transaction. Usually, most victims end up transferring the money through netbanking. My father went to the bank to make the transfer.

It is useful to include supporting evidence such as the fraudulent documents that scamsters send in digital arrest cases to convince the victims that a criminal case has been made out against them.

For example, my father was sent a “warrant” placing him in “digital custody” and a 70-point guideline to follow. Over a video call, a fake judge sent him a forged court order asking him to pledge all his assets as part of the investigation.

Filing the complaint is easier said than done. The victims are often in no mental state to relive the harrowing experience. It would help if a relative files it on their behalf.

My friend and I filed the complaint in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, from the login ID of my friend.

However, it is preferable – as we later found out – that the login ID on the cybercrime portal is created in the victim’s name.

Moreover, when we went to a cybercrime police station in Noida to follow up on the complaint, we were told that the case would be handled by the police in Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, where my family lives.

The process of transferring the case from the place of complaint to the place of crime takes several days – a disadvantage in cybercrime cases where prompt investigation is the key.

What are the next steps?

The online complaint is not enough. If you have been scammed, you also need to file a first information report at the nearest cybercrime police station.

For this, you will need the acknowledgement copy of the online complaint.

Some crucial details need to be part of this FIR – for instance, emails from the cybercrime portal informing you about how your money was moved through various accounts and the action taken by the banks to freeze the accounts.

The details of these transactions will help you to claim your money back.

It is essential to get a copy of the FIR as soon as possible because you will need that document to file a case of fraud in the court, which is the next step in the process of getting back the money.

However, getting a copy of the FIR could prove to be difficult if the police are slow to act.

Advocate Anuj Agarwal, who runs the non-profit Centre for Research on Cyber Crime and Cyber Law, told me that the police, already overburdened by such cases, are often reluctant to register an FIR in cybercrime cases.

We got a taste of this.

Though my father filed a complaint about the fraud at a police station in Jamshedpur on October 23, he got hold of the copy of the FIR only on November 6.

This was despite the fact that as a journalist, I had asked the deputy superintendent of cybercrime police in Jharkhand to expedite the investigation.

Once you get the copy of the FIR, you need to file a petition in the local court. The court will then pass an order directing the police to contact the banks involved in the fraudulent transaction and get them to return the money from the frozen bank accounts – this is when your hope of getting back the money goes up.

Not yet the end of the road

The biggest challenge in getting money back after a digital arrest fraud is that the cybercriminals swiftly transfer the amount through a network of what are called “mule bank accounts”.

Such accounts are created either by using stolen personal details – individuals’ Aadhaar and PAN card details – or by luring people with money into lending or renting their bank accounts for the operation.

Experts told me that the massive network of these accounts is the centrepiece of the cyber fraud system in India. “The fight against cyber criminals is essentially the fight to stop the mushrooming growth of mule accounts,” said a former fraud investigation officer at a Mumbai branch of the ICICI Bank, on condition of anonymity.

The scale of the network can be gauged from the fact that 4.5 lakh bank accounts have been frozen over the past year as they were used to siphon off the proceeds of cybercrime, The Indian Express reported recently.

In October, the Union home ministry said that investigation agencies in India were identifying 4,000 mule accounts every day that are used to receive and transfer funds illegally on behalf of others.

Sushil Kumar, a former Bihar nodal officer of the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, said that Telegram and Facebook are littered with ads which offer money to people to divulge their bank account details under the pretext of some scheme or offer.

“The ads promise some Rs 5,000 or Rs 10,000 just for signing up,” Kumar said. “For many, this is an offer that is too good to refuse.”

Signing up for this so-called business requires individuals to submit their mobile number, bank account details and other details. “Once you give this information, the scammers technically have the entire control of your bank account,” said Kumar. “The account holders are given a share of money for every transaction that is carried out from the account, so it seems a good deal for them too.”

In a recent example, the Chennai Police in November arrested an autorickshaw driver in Kerala who had opened a new bank account to lease it to cybercriminals for Rs 1 lakh. The account was being used to defraud people by making them transfer money in the name of online share trading. The autorickshaw driver reportedly confessed to have been involved in the scam that operated over WhatsApp.

In many cases, however, people end up becoming mule account holders unwittingly. In October, the police in Bengaluru arrested four mule account holders – a beautician, a factory owner and two labourers. They said that the bank executive who got them to open accounts had collected their passbooks and debit cards.

The four people were also given a commission of Rs 25,000 each and told that large transactions in their accounts would make them eligible for loans. The accounts were used in a trading investment scam, the police said. They said that this was the first time they had arrested bank officials in such a case.

Using a maze of these accounts, the fraudsters siphon the money out of the country.

A race to the bottom

Even if you end up securing a court order directing the police to get your money back, that might not actually be enough.

Cyber awareness expert Gautam Mengle explained why.

“Say you have been defrauded of Rs 10 lakh and you file a complaint against a particular bank account,” he told me. “Now, this account has likely been used to carry out a number of other scams and it has transferred out money to various other mule accounts. It could be the case that five other complaints have been filed against the same bank account, but most of the money has already been siphoned off to other accounts.”

Mengle said the victim who is the first to stake a claim on the money frozen in the scammer’s account has the edge.

“Let’s say if there is only Rs 4 lakh left in the scammer’s account and someone gets a court order asking to release Rs 10 lakh, he would get only Rs 4 lakh because there is no trace of the rest of the money. Worse still, other victims might not get anything because whatever money was there has already been given to the person who first got the order.”

We saw the evidence of what Mengle said in a report that the police gave us on the transactions involving my father’s money.

By October 24, just two days after he transferred the money to a bank account number provided by the scamsters, it was used for 57 transactions. The money was transferred across accounts in 16 different banks, and it was also used for payments over apps like PayTM and Google Pay.

The police categorised these transactions into nine layers, which indicate that at least nine different individuals were operating these bank accounts, a cybercrime police official from Jharkhand told us.

Sushil Kumar, the former officer of the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, said that it is often difficult to get the money back that has been transferred beyond three or four layers. “Beyond a point, it becomes impossible to trace the money,” Kumar said. “It involves the jurisdiction of police in different states and multiple branches of various banks.”

In my father’s case too, the same pattern seems to be playing out.

On the instructions of the fraudsters, he had transferred Rs 10.42 lakh to a State Bank of India branch in Patna.

The Rs 2.5 lakh that he received on December 19 came from a Yes Bank branch in Maharashtra, to which the money was then transferred.

The police have said that another tranche of more than Rs 4 lakh is expected to come from the State Bank of India. But this would take time, the police have said, as this amount was frozen at a branch in the Bengaluru circle of the SBI, and getting the money back to my father's ICICI Bank account in Jamshedpur involves various processes within the banking system.

Moreover, there is no clarity yet on whether the rest of the amount will be returned, even as the police say that the investigation is ongoing.

Reflecting on the episode, my father told me that it was the most traumatic episode of his life. “For now, it seems like I will be lucky to get back some money, but the worst part is that I am still not able to come to terms with what happened,” he said. “It is suffocating to know that I am a victim, and yet I feel embarrassed to tell people that.”

This is the second in a four-part series on Indians being targeted by Southeast Asia’s cybercrime syndicates.