Gurugram Woman Loses Rs 5.85 Crore In Cyber Scam, Blames Banks

A Gurugram woman who lost Rs 5.85 crore in a "digital arrest" scam is now asking questions of her banks that cleared the transfers. Despite repeated awareness campaigns about cyber fraud, banks failed to safeguard her money when fraudsters coerced her into transferring it, she has alleged.

"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 September 2024, the woman victim got a call from a person claiming to be from a courier company. The person alleged that Mumbai customs had seized a drug parcel she was sending to Beijing, according to the BBC.

The fraudsters tricked the victim by pretending to be law enforcement officials. They got on a video call with her, wearing fake uniforms and showing false IDs to look convincing. During the call, they told her that she was involved in a crime and would be sent to jail for life if she didn't cooperate, and even threatened to harm her son if she disobeyed.

The fraudsters kept her under constant watch on Skype for five straight days. "After that, my brain stopped working. My mind just shut down," she recalled. 

She told the BBC that on 4 September 2024, she rushed to her HDFC Bank branch while still being watched on video calls by scammers and transferred Rs 2.8 crore that day, and another Rs 3 crore the next.

According to her, the bank should have caught the unusual activity. The amounts were nearly 200 times bigger than her normal transactions, yet no red flags were raised, she said. She also questioned why her premium account manager didn't call her or why the bank's system didn't stop such huge withdrawals.

She further mentioned that whenever someone spends even Rs 50,000 on a credit card, banks usually call to verify the transaction. But in her case, when she withdrew millions from her savings account, there were no checks, no alerts, and no phone calls from the bank.

She said she even found problems at every step in India's top banks when she tried to trace her money. She said the money was sent to Piyush's account in an ICICI Bank. Before the transfer, this account only had a few thousand rupees in it, she said.

She asked ICICI Bank why it allowed such huge deposits into an almost empty account without flagging it?

HDFC Bank, in an email to her, called her allegations "baseless." It argued that the fraud was only reported to them two or three days later, and by then, the transfers had already gone through. The bank also said that since the transactions were carried out on her own instructions, their staff could not be blamed.

She mentioned that ICICI Bank's delay in freezing the account of Piyush cost her dearly. ICICI Bank told the BBC that they had properly followed all KYC rules when opening his account, and they even froze his account as soon as the victim complained. 

During the investigation, it was found that money was quickly moved into 11 different accounts at Sree Padmavathi Cooperative Bank in Hyderabad, which is affiliated with Federal Bank. Out of those 11 accounts, eight had fake addresses and their KYC documents were missing.

Police say most of them didn't even know that large sums of money were flowing through their accounts.

She is currently battling the case and has since recovered only Rs 1 crore.

The number of digital arrest scams and related cybercrimes in the country almost tripled between 2022 and 2024, according to Business Standard. In 2024, the number of such cases almost tripled to 1,23,672.