A common joke going around these days in India when a person does not pick your calls is that that person might be under digital arrest. Digital arrest, a new scandal that has been removing millions of rupees from the accounts of hundreds of Indians in the Indian urban spaces. It all starts with a call that comes from a bass-voiced unknown person who claims to be an anti-graft investigator. You are told that your credentials including PAN and Aadhar were used to conduct a particular fraud which comes under the ambit of national security and you could face minimum ten years in prison if you do not co-operate. Another modus operandi is that you are told over a video call from a guy in police uniform that the parcel you had send to a country like Iran or Argentina contained contraband.
In some cases we are observing that there is a proper court setting – a well-meaning judge, a bunch of lawyers with police officers in toe, and a Jamboree of general audience listening attentively to what the judge says. You are asked to keep the phone continuously charged and not to shut down the call – shutting down the call would translate to your complicity in the crime for which the trial is held. There are people who have been detained on their office chair for days together, or on their home sofa for a whole week. This is the phenomenon of digital arrest that the whole country is struggling against.
Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai are some of the places where hundreds of well-meaning IT professionals have been thugged digitally. In some cases some of the illustrations business owners, actors , bureaucrats and even some low profile politicians have fallen for this trap. A theory is being produced that this vulnerability to such fraudsters stems from a lack of belief in speedy justice. In India some cases linger on for years, and in some cases decades. The high-earning professionals do not want to run the rosh of their foreign travels being barred and other punitive actions from the law enforcement during the trial. So they comply with the directions of the fraudsters in lieu of speedy justice.
The government has done a tremendous job in disseminating the information about these fraudsters online as well through press, radio and television mediums. In fact some business management courses and journalism schools have kept a separate bunch of classes on digital arrest. For some this Evangelisation came too late, they lost crores of rupees with no hope of getting their hard earned money back.
