Erupted by millions in Digital Arrest, the Indian woman is looking for answers from banks

* Anjali’s nightmare started with a phone call, which will cost her 58.5 million rupees ($ 663 390).

The call claims to be from a courier company, claiming that Mumbai’s customs have seized a drug plot she sends to Beijing.

Anjali, a Gurugram resident, a suburb of the Indian capital Delhi, became a prey of a Digital arrest fraud – Cheaters posing for video calls and threatens to prison life and harm to their son, unless she obeys.

For over five excruciating days last September, they kept her under 24/7 Skype surveillance, terrified her with threats and forced her to eliminate her savings and transfer the money.

“Then my brain stopped working. My mind closed,” she says.

By the time the calls stopped, Anjali was broken – her confidence was destroyed, her wealth disappeared.

Her case is far from unique.

Government data It shows that the Indians have lost millions of dollars from digital arrests, with the reported cases being almost tripled to 123,000 between 2022 and 2024.

The fraud has become so stormy that the government is resorting to all-page ads, radio and television campaigns and even a warning to a minister. Officials say they have blocked nearly 4,000 Skype identification numbers and over 83,000 WhatsApp accounts associated with fraud.

Anjali spent last year between police departments and the courts, tracking the traces of her missing money and petitions – including the Prime Minister – for help.

Victims say that towering fraud, weak precautions and poor recovery expose regulatory gaps in a country where digital banking has outpaced cybercrime checks, conquering people in the classes.

Anjali says that tracking his money with failures at every level of the best banks in India.

She told the BBC that she rushed to her branch of the HDFC bank – the largest private lender in India – on September 4, 2024, panicked and under CCTV by fraudsters, transferring 28 million rupees that day and another 30 meters to the next.

She claims that the bank has not been able to find red flags or trigger signals for abnormal transactions, although the amounts she transfer is 200 times larger than her usual withdrawal model.

She wonders why her premium account did not call the manager of her ties and why the bank failed to file such massive debits.

“Did the size of the transfers I did everything in less than three days be enough to raise suspicion and even prevent the crime?” He asks Anjali, noting that if the credit card spends 50,000 rupees, they activate call calls, why not multi -millionth with savings accounts.

In an email to Anjali, which BBC saw, HDFC called it the claims “unfounded” and said the fraud incident was reported to the bank after a two -three delay. He added that transactions were authorized by the bank by its instructions so that its employees could not be guilty.

India’s banking ombudsman closed his complaint against HDFC, citing a 2017 rule, which causes customers as Anjali to carry the full loss if the fraud is considered their mistake.

HDFC Bank did not answer BBC questions.

When we met Anjali, she showed us a huge diagram that made her money traveling from one bank to another.

He showed that the funds were first passed from HDFC to an account held by “Piyush” to ICICI Bank, also one of the largest private creditors in India.

A Money Trail police investigation revealed that the Piyush account has barely had a balance of several thousand rupees before the transfer.

Anjali Questions Why ICICI authorizes multiple funds to the account “When such sudden large deposits have ideally triggered automated transaction monitoring systems according to the obligations to combat each bank’s exams.”

She also wonders how the bank allowed a quick swelling of the money from the account of d -n piyush, without temporarily freezing it or making an additional check on your client (KYC).

While ICICI filed a complaint against G -n piyush – which was arrested briefly and then released on bail – Anjali says that the delay in freezing his account turned out to be very expensive for her.

In a statement to the BBC, ICICI stated that all the “prescribed knowledge of your client” had followed, while opening the account and to the contested transactions, he did not show suspicious activity. It says that “any insinuation that the bank has failed in its proper pronouncement is entirely unfounded.”

The bank said it froze the bill immediately after Anjali’s complaint and helped her bring a case to the police and follow the owner of the mule account.

The Ombudsman has also closed his complaint against ICICI, saying that the bank has complied with the KYC rules when it opens the G -n Piyush account and that it cannot predict that it will be used for what it describes are fraudulent activities.

Police found that within four minutes after reaching ICICI, the bigger part of her money was directed to 11 accounts at the Cooperative Bank Sree Padmavathi, a branch of the Federal Bank in Hyderabad City.

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

Their KYC documents were also not available to the bank. The other three account owners were a Rickshaw driver, a widow who did a sewing work in a small town of a black and carpenter.

Police found that with the exception of one, account holders did not know about the large sums that flow through their accounts.

In May, police arrested former director of the bank for Samudral Venkateshwalu cooperative – he remained in prison, with the court rejecting his petition for a guarantee three times, “given the gravity and the distant impact of cyber fraud.”

The police report alleges that many of these accounts were opened at the request of Venkateshwaralu and were essentially mules – which open in the names of other people but were sold to criminals who operated them for money laundering.

Neither the Federal Bank nor the Sree Padmavathi bank responded to the BBC detailed questionnaire.

More than a year after the loss of their money, Anjali and other petitions are the best consumer court in India in January, who acknowledged their complaint as a “service deficit” by banks. Banks must respond by listening in November.

As such frauds become more complicated, there is increasing discussions Globally, which ultimately pays for financial fraud – and what banks for responsibility, financial institutions and regulators carry.

Last October The United Kingdom tightened the rules About the responsibility of payment service providers requiring them to restore customers, prohibiting exceptions that fall victim to some types of financial fraud.

“Banks have an obligation to take care of customers. If the bank is monitoring an activity in an account that contradicts its common transactions models, it must stop this transaction,” the BBC told the BBC.

He accuses the banks of indirectly the “promoting financial suicide” of the applicants by opening cash accounts for money, failing to constantly carry out the customer check and in his obligation to retain and defend their money.

But so far, the relief has proven to be elusive to Anjali – it managed to restore only 10 meters from 58 m rupees, which lost from the fraud. And D -Limai says it is likely to be a long battle ahead.

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

The purchased investments are taxed on capital profits, even when lost by fraudsters. She is now praying for exemption from such taxation.

“There is currently no recognition of such crimes by the income tax department, this is the financial misery of the victims,” ​​she says.

*The victim’s real name has been changed to protect her identity.

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