Now you see me, now you don’t

Stay-at-home mother falls victim to 'digital arrest' scam, highlighting the rise of cybercrimes in India.

Over the past three months, Ruchi Garg, 44, a stay-at-home mother of two in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, has preferred offline transactions to digital ones. In August, a 13-minute WhatsApp audio call changed the way she uses the Internet and social media. Like many others in her circle, Garg used to spend up to eight hours on her phone on various social media apps, especially WhatsApp.

One morning, after her second son had gone to school and her husband to office, Garg got a WhatsApp call from a number displaying the photo of a police officer in uniform. “I couldn’t understand why a police officer would be calling me,” she says.

“The man spoke quickly, saying that my elder son, who is studying engineering in a college in Vellore [in Tamil Nadu], had been arrested in a major scam. He told me that if I wanted to save his reputation, I would have to pay ₹80,000,” she says. The money, he said, was to prevent her son’s photograph from being widely circulated.

“He didn’t let me hang up. He insisted that if I wanted to consult my husband, I should call him from another number,” says Garg. She panicked and sent the money to the Unified Payments Interface number the scammer had given her. “I could hear my son’s screams in the background,” she recalls. “Maybe they used AI to generate his voice.” When the caller asked for more money, something felt odd, and she called her son from another number. “He said he was in class. I understood that I had been scammed and hung up,” she says.

Garg is overwhelmed by what happened to her; shocked that the scammer had profiled her, and knew where and what her son was studying. There is fear of being scammed again. “I verbally informed the Senior Superintendent of Police in Vellore as I was worried about my son, but they did not pursue the case as the [scammer’s] number was from Pakistan,” she says.

Garg is among thousands of Indians who have been the target of a scam known colloquially as ‘digital arrest’. From January 1 to November 15 this year, as many as 92,323 ‘digital arrests’ have been reported across the country with people collectively being cheated of ₹2,140.99 crore, as per the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) that operates under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and is the nodal body for monitoring, analysing, and investigating cybercrime trends. There are many more like Garg who have not filed police complaints.

On October 27, Prime Minister Narendra Modi cautioned people against the new cybercrime. He described what Garg and others like her have gone through. Criminals collect personal information and make phone or video calls to prospective victims. They pose as officials from various law enforcement agencies, and at times from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and extort money by creating an atmosphere of fear.