Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant on Monday expressed his concern over new age “digital arrest” scams where educated citizens are being lured into digital arrests, where scammers often use Whatsapp video calling feature and impersonate themselves as high officials like police officers, judges, and other bureaucrats to extort money.
The said observation was made by him highlighting an incident where a woman, a public official known to him lost her entire post-retirement savings to these digital scams. This incident was pointed out by the CJI when the Attorney General for India R Venkataramani sought adjournment in a suo-motu case on this issue stating that various departments are still coordinating their response.
The Ministry of Home Affairs have proposed a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to deal with such cyber-crimes after constituting a high level Inter Departmental Committee. This step was taken last year when the court took the issue in a suo-motu case and transferred the investigation to the CBI across all states.
The Court also expressed that the banks should develop a real-time alert system for its customers when a large sum of money is being transacted. Such system will safeguard the victim on a system which operates on logic and data.
Amicus curiae Senior Advocate NS Nappinai suggested a technical remedy in the form of “kill switch” which could help prevent irreversible financial losses. She also pointed out that where a victim’s brain is literally unable to process the “stop” command because of intense fear after getting a call from the higher authorities. Only a technical safeguard can prevent such crimes to take place. The court during the hearing also learnt that more than Rs 3000 crore fraud has been committed through these cyber scams.
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