'Digital Arrests' Are Swindling Indians Out of Millions

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00:00What if someone called you out of the blue and threatened to arrest you for smuggling drugs

00:04or laundering money for human traffickers? And then, when you protested, they demanded not a

00:10bribe, but proof of innocence. You have to send over all the money in your bank to government

00:14approved bank accounts. You would think it's a scam, right? But what if they knew your address,

00:19tax account number, and your national ID? And what if they sent you an arrest warrant

00:24that looked like this? You might start to get worried. That's exactly what's happening to

00:29hundreds of thousands of affluent Indians nowadays. The scam is called digital arrest.

00:34One ex-banker says he was conned out of 230 million rupees or 2.6 million dollars.

00:39And I recently talked to this man, Beren Yadav, who lost 15.9 million rupees or 181,000 dollars.

00:47He was interrogated via Skype by a Central Bureau of Investigation officer, basically India's version

00:53of the FBI. But in reality, it was just an actor playing a very convincing role. He sent

00:59Yadav to four different banks over two days and took all his life savings. Coincidentally,

01:04Yadav's neighbor was also targeted. Her ordeal lasted five days and she lost more than $600,000.

01:11In total, victims of India's digital arrest scams have lost the equivalent of $300 million

01:17since 2022. But that official statistic is probably a drastic underestimate. It's well known that globally,

01:24only 28% of the victims of financial scams report the crime to law enforcement, while one in five

01:31doesn't even try to get their money back. In India, police sometimes tell people not to bother reporting

01:36their loss because they would be lucky to get a few cents on the dollar back. By the time law enforcement

01:42swings into action, the con artists have often either withdrawn the cash or moved it to another

01:47mule account. These bank accounts are either owned by people who had no idea their identities had been

01:52hijacked or by people who lent their accounts to criminals in exchange for payment or favors.

01:58The actual perpetrators are harder to track because they operate in shadowy networks often

02:04controlled from overseas, especially Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. India's digital revolution has partly

02:11contributed to the problem. Everything is digitized nowadays, but in the absence of strong privacy laws,

02:17people have become vulnerable to their information slipping out of loosely guarded databases

02:22and into the dark web. Besides, money moves very fast nowadays in India. That's true for both small

02:28transactions on smartphones and large transfers done at bank branches. Then there are mules. Some 550

02:36million new bank accounts have gotten created over the past decade. Banks claim they have done proper

02:41authentication checks on these customers, but their reality is different. So how can India stop this

02:47growing threat? The country's telecom regulator could implement warnings like this. Banks could use similar

02:54alerts too. In fact, some are already starting to. But it won't be enough. India should look to the shifting

02:59global landscape. Just because a customer went to a bank branch and initiated a transaction doesn't mean they acted

03:05out of their free will. Singapore, Hong Kong and the UK are all starting to put banks on the hook for the

03:10customer's loss where the banks have been negligent. Meanwhile, if you're targeted, just try to remember

03:16you can't always rely on your fight or flight instincts to get you out of the situation. If you can't

03:23disconnect the threatening call, take a break, text a friend or a family member, take power back from the

03:28brain's threat detection center and hand it over to the part in charge of rational thought. You'll be okay.