Doucé of millions of “digital stops”, the Indian woman is looking for responses from banks

Anjali’s nightmare * started with a telephone call which would cost it 58.5 million rupees ($ 663,390).

The appellant said the email company, alleging that Mumbai’s customs had seized a drug package that she sent to Beijing.

Anjali, a resident of Gurugram, a suburbs of the Indian capital Delhi, has become the prey of a “digital arrest” scam – fraudsters pretending to be responsible for the application of video calls and threatening it with life prison and prejudice to her son unless she has obeyed.

During the five -day heartbreaking days last September, they kept it under 24/7 surveillance on Skype, terrified her with threats and forced her to liquidate his savings and transfer money.

“After that, my brain has stopped working. My mind stopped,” she said.

As the calls stopped, Anjali was broken – his confidence broke, his fortune disappeared.

His case is far from unique.

Government data show that the Indians have lost millions of dollars due to “digital arrests”, the cases reported to be tripled almost to 123,000 between 2022 and 2024.

The scam has become so attractive that the government has used complete advertisements, radio and television campaigns, and even a warning from Prime Minister. Officials say they have blocked nearly 4,000 Skype identifiers and more than 83,000 WhatsApp accounts related to fraud.

Anjali spent last year to commute between the police and the courts, tracing the trace of his missing money and petitioning the authorities – including the Prime Minister – for help.

The victims say that the outbreak of scams, weak bank backgrounds and poor recovery exhibit regulatory gaps in a country where the digital bank has exceeded cybercrime checks, trapping people through courses.

Anjali says that tracing its monetary track has exposed failures at all levels of the main banks in India.

She told the BBC that she had rushed into her HDFC bank branch – the largest private lender in India – on September 4, 2024, panicked and under video surveillance by crooks, transferring 28 m rupees that day and 30 meters.

She alleges that the bank has not detected red flags or triggered alerts for abnormal transactions, even if the amounts it transfer was 200 times larger than its usual withdrawal model.

She wonders why her premium account made no call from her relations manager and why the bank did not report such massive flows.

“The size of the transfers that I made all this in less than three days would not have been sufficient to arouse suspicion and even prevent the crime?” Anjali asks, noting that if the credit card spends 50,000 rupees trigger verification calls, why not withdrawals from several million savings accounts.

In an email in Anjali, which the BBC has seen, HDFC called its “baseless” allegations and said that the fraud incident had been reported to the bank after a delay of two to three days. He added that the transactions were authorized by the bank on his instructions so that his officials cannot be wrong.

The banking mediator of India has closed his complaint against HDFC, citing a rule of 2017 which makes customers like Anjali bear a total loss if fraud is considered an error.

The HDFC bank has not answered questions from the BBC.

When we met Anjali, she showed us a huge graphic that she had compiled on how her money traveled from one bank to another.

He has shown that funds went from HDFC to an account held by “Mr. Piyush” in Icici Bank, also one of the largest private lenders in India.

A police investigation on the monetary track revealed that Mr. Piyush’s account had barely a balance of a few thousand rupees before the transfer.

Anjali wonders why ICICI authorized the transfers of multiple funds to the account “When such significant deposits should ideally have to trigger systems for monitoring automated transactions within the framework of the laundering obligations of the bank”.

She also wonders how the bank allowed a rapid release of money from Mr. Piyush without freezing it temporarily or doing your customer’s additional verification (KYC).

While Icici filed a complaint against Mr. Piyush – who was briefly arrested and then released on bail – Anjali says that a delay in the frost of her account was very expensive for her.

In a declaration to the BBC, ICICI declared that they had followed all the procedures “prescribed to know your customer” when the account is opened and until the contested transactions had presented no suspicious activity. He said that “any innuendo that the bank failed in its due diligence is entirely unfounded”.

The bank said that it frozen the account immediately after Anjali’s complaint and helped her file a police case and trace the Mule account holder.

The Ombudsman also paid its complaint against ICICI saying that the bank had followed KYC’s rules when Mr. Piyush’s account opened, and that it could not have predicts that it would be used for what it describes was fraudulent activities.

The police found that within four minutes of the realization of the ICICI, the majority of his money was channeled on 11 accounts in Sree Padmavathi Cooperative Bank, a subsidiary of the Federal Bank in Hyderabad City.

They found that the addresses of eight of the 11 were fictitious and that the account holders could not be traced.

Their KYC documents were not available with the bank either. The three remaining account holders were a pusher driver, a widow doing sewing work in a small slum and a carpenter.

The police found that, with the exception of that one, the account holders were not aware of the large sums crossing their accounts.

In May, the police arrested the former director of the cooperative bank Samudrala Venkateshwaralu – he remains in prison, the court rejecting his request for deposit three times “taking into account the large -scale gravity and impact of the cyber -fraudes”.

The police report alleys that many of these accounts have been opened at the request of Venkatehwaralu and were mainly mulest accounts – which are open on behalf of the others but sold to criminals who exploit them to whiten money.

Neither the Federal Bank nor Sree Padmavathi Bank answered the detailed BBC questionnaire.

More than a year after losing his money, Anjali and others asked for the best consumer court of India in January, which admitted their complaint of “service of services” by banks. Banks must respond, with an audience due in November.

As such scams become more complex, there are growing discussions around the world which ultimately pays financial fraud – and what responsibilities that banks, financial institutions and regulators carry.

Last October, the United Kingdom tightened the rules around the responsibility of payment service providers, forcing them to reimburse customers, with less exceptions which are victims of certain types of financial fraud.

“Banks have a duty of diligence towards customers. If a bank observes an activity in an account incompatible with its overall transaction models, he must stop this transaction,” a lawyer who fights with a dozen victims of digital arrest, including Anjali, told the BBC Mahendra Limaye.

He accuses banks of “indirectly encouraging financial suicide” of the complainants by opening money accounts in money, failing in their duty to make the continuous reasonable diligence of customers and their duty to preserve and protect their money.

But so far, the emergency services have proven to be elusive for Anjali – she has managed to recover barely 10 m of 58 million rupees that she has lost for fraud. And Mr. Limaye says it is probably an upcoming prolonged battle.

To add salt to her injuries, Anjali says, she is forced to pay taxes on the money stolen from her.

Investments exchanged is imposed on capital gains, even when they are lost because of fraudsters. It now pleads for the exemption from such taxation.

“For the moment, there is no recognition of these crimes by the income tax department, this aggravates the financial misery of the victims,” ​​she said.

* The real name of the victim has been changed to protect his identity.

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