Woman Loses $663,440 After Scammers Trick Her Into Thinking Police Had Seized a Drug Parcel: Report

A wave of “digital arrest” scams has been siphoning money from victims across India, including one woman who reportedly lost 58.5 million rupees ($664,919) last year.

The woman, who goes by the pseudonym “Anjali” in a report published by the BBC, says she received a call last September from someone who claimed to work for a courier company.

The caller fraudulently claimed Mumbai customs officials had seized a drug parcel they said Anjali was shipping to China. Con artists pretended to be law enforcement agents, claiming she could be sent to prison for life.

The fraudsters, who also reportedly threatened Anjali’s son, kept her on video call surveillance for five days. Anjali says they manipulated her panic and convinced her to go to her local HDFC Bank branch on multiple days and transfer her life savings in two transactions.

She also tells the BBC that HDFC, India’s largest private sector bank, failed to flag the transactions or slow them down even though they were starkly different from her previous pattern of withdrawals.

“Should the size of transfers that I made all in a matter of under three days not have been enough to raise suspicion and even prevent the crime?” 

India’s banking ombudsman, however, reportedly cleared the bank of responsibility, saying the fraud was Anjali’s error.

Indian government data indicates there were 123,000 reported cases of “digital arrest” scams last year, according to the BBC.

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