Gurugram: The banks that processed the transfers are now being questioned by a woman from Gurugram who lost Rs 5.85 crore in a “digital arrest” fraud. She has claimed that banks failed to protect her money when scammers forced her to transfer it, despite several awareness efforts about cyber fraud.
“Should the size of transfers that I made all in under three days not have been enough to raise suspicion and even prevent the crime?” she inquired.
The victim, a woman, received a call in September 2024 from someone posing as a courier. According to the BBC, the individual said that a drug package she was shipping to Beijing had been confiscated by Mumbai customs.
The scammers pretended to be law enforcement officers in order to deceive the victim. To look plausible, they put on phony uniforms and presented fictitious identification when they were on a video conference with her. They threatened to kill her son if she ignored them during the call, telling her that she was implicated in a crime and that she would be imprisoned for life if she didn’t participate.
For five days in a row, the scammers monitored her constantly on Skype. “My brain ceased functioning after that. She remembered, “My mind just shut down.”
While still being followed on video calls by scammers, she hurried to her HDFC Bank branch on September 4, 2024, and transferred Rs 2.8 crore that day and another Rs 3 crore the next day, she told the BBC.
She said the bank ought to have noticed the odd behavior. She claimed that despite the amounts being almost 200 times greater than her typical transactions, no warning signs were triggered. She also asked why the bank’s system failed to prevent such large transactions and why her premium account manager didn’t contact her.
She added that banks typically call to confirm transactions when someone spends even Rs 50,000 on a credit card. However, in her situation, the bank did not send her any checks, warnings, or phone calls when she took millions out of her savings account.
She claimed that when she attempted to track down her money, she encountered issues at every turn in India’s leading banks. According to her, the funds were transferred to Piyush’s ICICI Bank account. She stated that there were only a few thousand rupees in this account prior to the transfer.
She questioned ICICI Bank about why it failed to flag such large deposits into an almost empty account.
In an email to her, HDFC Bank referred to her claims as “baseless.” It said that the transfers had already occurred by the time the scam was brought to their attention, which was only two or three days later. Additionally, the bank stated that its employees could not be held accountable because the transactions were executed at her own direction.
She said she suffered a great deal as a result of ICICI Bank’s tardiness in freezing Piyush’s account. ICICI Bank told the BBC that they had opened his account in compliance with all KYC regulations and that they had frozen it as soon as the victim lodged a complaint.
The examination revealed that funds were swiftly transferred into 11 distinct accounts at the Federal Bank-affiliated Sree Padmavathi Cooperative Bank in Hyderabad. Eight of those eleven accounts lacked KYC documentation and had fictitious addresses.
According to the police, the majority of them were unaware that substantial amounts of money were passing through their accounts.
She has barely recovered Rs 1 crore and is still fighting the lawsuit.
According to Business Standard, between 2022 and 2024, the nation’s digital arrest frauds and associated cybercrimes nearly tripled. The number of these cases nearly tripled to 1,23,672 in 2024.
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