Gurugram Woman Loses ₹5.85 Crore in ‘Digital Arrest’ Scam, Questions Banks’ Role

A Gurugram woman who lost ₹5.85 crore in a “digital arrest” scam is now holding her banks accountable for not flagging the unusual transfers. Despite repeated awareness campaigns on cyber fraud, she alleges that the banks failed to act when fraudsters coerced her into draining her savings.

“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 asked in a conversation with the BBC.

How the scam unfolded

The ordeal began in September 2024, when the woman received a call from someone pretending to be from a courier company. The caller claimed that a parcel she had sent to Beijing containing drugs had been seized by Mumbai customs.

The fraudsters then impersonated law enforcement officers, complete with fake uniforms and IDs shown over a video call. They threatened her with life imprisonment and even warned of harm to her son if she didn’t cooperate.

For five days, scammers kept her under constant surveillance on Skype, breaking down her willpower. On September 4, still being watched on video calls, she rushed to her HDFC Bank branch and transferred ₹2.8 crore. The next day, she transferred another ₹3 crore.

“Banks failed me”

The victim says her transactions were nearly 200 times larger than her usual activity, yet no red flags were raised. She questioned why her premium account manager at HDFC Bank did not step in, and why routine fraud alerts—like those usually triggered for even a ₹50,000 credit card purchase—were not applied in her case.

She also raised concerns about ICICI Bank, where the money was first transferred to an account belonging to a man named Piyush. Before her transfer, the account reportedly had only a few thousand rupees. “Why did ICICI allow such huge deposits into an almost empty account without flagging it?” she asked.

HDFC Bank dismissed her allegations as “baseless,” saying the fraud was reported days later, by which time the transfers had already gone through. ICICI Bank said it had followed proper KYC norms and froze the account immediately after receiving her complaint.

Money trail

Investigations later revealed that the funds were quickly routed into 11 accounts at Sree Padmavathi Cooperative Bank in Hyderabad, affiliated with Federal Bank. Eight of those accounts had fake addresses and missing KYC documents. Police said most account holders had no idea large sums of money were moving through their names.

So far, the victim has managed to recover only ₹1 crore.

Rising cases of ‘digital arrest’ scams

According to Business Standard, the number of digital arrest scams and related cybercrimes in India nearly tripled between 2022 and 2024, reaching 1,23,672 reported cases in 2024.

The Gurugram woman continues to fight her case, but her ordeal raises tough questions about how well banks are prepared to safeguard customers in the face of increasingly sophisticated scams.