The Supreme Court on Monday directed a pan-India CBI probe into the rising wave of digital arrests and asked the states, Reserve Bank and telecom authorities to help the central agency bust the racket.
The apex court directed all the states to grant consent to the CBI investigation, and sought the impleadment of the RBI and the Union telecom ministry to enlist their cooperation with the investigation.
Section 6 of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946, makes a state government’s consent necessary for the CBI to carry out an investigation within its territory.
Many states, including Bengal and Tamil Nadu, had earlier withdrawn their general consent to the central agency to probe offences within their borders, accusing it of acting like a tool of the Union government.
Monday’s directive to all the states to grant consent to the CBI to probe digital arrests is therefore being seen as significant.
Digital arrests involve cyber fraudsters impersonating law enforcers or government officials to intimidate victims — often by implicating them in crime — into sending them money or personal information. Most of the victims tend to be elderly people.
The bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi asked the CBI to take Interpol’s help to track down scamsters involved in digital arrests, since media reports suggest that most of these gangs operate from foreign soil.
Justice Kant said the CBI would be free to probe the possible roles of all bankers in the country in this context, since the money stolen by the fraudsters was mostly transferred through bank accounts.
He asked the telecom ministry to devise protocols and standard operating procedures to prevent the large-scale and multiple use of SIM cards by the racketeers.
The apex court clarified that the CBI would probe digital arrests as well as other forms of cyber crime such as digital investment fraud and part-time-job scams on
the Internet.
It underlined that multiple instances of digital arrest were being reported from across the country even after the top court had in October taken suo motu cognisance of the menace and issued directives.
On October 17, the Supreme Court had issued notices to the Centre and the CBI and sought attorney-general R. Venkataramani’s assistance to evolve a pan-Indian strategy to bust the digital arrest racket.
The order came after the court had taken suo motu cognisance of a complaint that then Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai had received from an elderly couple, robbed of their life’s savings through a digital arrest scam in September.
“Ordinarily we would have directed the state police to expedite the investigation and take it to a logical conclusion,” the top court had said at the time.
“We are, however, aghast… that the fraudsters have fabricated judicial orders in the name of the Supreme Court of India and various other documents.”
On November 17, the bench of Justice Kant and Justice Bagchi had passed an “unusual order” directing that three suspects arrested on digital-arrest charges should not be granted bail by any court in the country till the investigations were complete.