Digital arrests are getting more and more common by the day.
It is a typical scam where scammers target vulnerable individuals
When we say vulnerable, a large target of such scams are senior citizens who have some savings or retirement funds that they have worked for and saved so that the corpus can be used to meet their financial requirements enabling them to be independent and not having to rely on family or children for financial support. Thus this pool of money makes them the target of so many financial frauds and scams.
This saving is to help them live a comfortable life however as we discover day after day and scam after scam these set of individuals are getting more and more targeted by the unscrupulous scammers who would go to any extent to scam and loot the individuals that they target.
Cybercriminals are looking for such soft targets who are alone or can be easily targeted and coerced into paying up using the reach of technology.
It is easy to preach about the do’s and don'ts of such scams however in this post let us see things as they unfold from the eyes of a senior citizen who at times is lonely and struggling to keep pace with the changing face of technology that he finds all around him.
Step into the shoes of a 90 year old doctor
The digital arrest gets initiated when you get numerous unidentified calls from unknown individuals.
These individuals claim to be officers of TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) and some are posing as police officers from a particular state.
The mode of contact is video calls
Over video calls those posing as high ranking government officials from the police and telecom department would show you fake or forged documents.
Such an experience can be quite unnerving for anyone even more so if you are a senior citizen of ninety years of age.
These scammers force you into a fabricated virtual court hearing where charges after charges are levied against you.
As these fake proceeds go on every attempt is made to unnerve you by levying false charges from fraud to treason.
You are threatened and as time passes and you begin to soften and crack the scammers coerce you into paying up large sums of money as they claim it is ill gotten money.
The skill of the scammers lies in the fact that they manage to apply so much psychological pressure on the targeted victim that in order to get off the hook he or she goes to the extent of liquidating his assets and savings in the bank such as term deposits.
The scammers force the victim into transferring this liquid cash from his to various bank accounts that the scammers control.
It is only when the scammers feel that they have extracted the maximum amount of money from the victim the digital arrest stops.
The small window of opportunity to get your funds back
Most of the targeted victims are too shaken up to take any legal action.
By the time they become stable a lot of time is lost.
This is a race against time. On one side the scammers are in a hurry to withdraw the money into various accounts and turn it into cash or other hard to detect assets.
For the victim there is a small window of opportunity to act swiftly and do damage control.
Beware that this small window closes fast and you as a victim need to call up the cops and the cyber security department of your city so that an action can be initiated and lost funds can be recovered.
The victim in this post is a medical doctor who got duped of 3.42 crore.
When he reported the incident to the authorities they came into action and a total of 2.2 crore got recovered.
Awareness is the only way to protect individuals
It is important to promote awareness and education. There has to be more surveillance and monitoring activity over individuals who have a track record of doing such crimes.
Main image created with AI