The Supreme Court on Monday said digital frauds siphoning off over ₹52,000 crore from bank accounts was “robbery and dacoity” and asked the Centre to draw up draft rules in consultation with the Reserve Bank, other banks and the telecom department to deal with such cases.
The government has to submit the draft policy to the court within four weeks, and notify the rules in another two weeks, a three-judge bench said.
It said these should include the RBI’s new standard operating procedure (SOP) guideline asking banks to temporarily freeze debits from a customer’s account the moment suspicious activity is noticed.
The court also asked the government to consider ways of compensating victims of digital fraud.
It pulled up the banks for failing their customers’ trust and observed that the Centre’s affidavit had mentioned the theft of ₹52,000 crore from bank accounts between April 2021 and December 2024. It noted that the amount was bigger than the annual budget of several states.
“This is nothing but robbery and dacoity,” the bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice N.V. Anjaria told attorney-general R. Venkatramani, who was appearing for the Centre.
The bench was dealing with a matter it had taken up on its own last year after an elderly couple wrote to the then Chief Justice detailing how crores had been stolen from their bank account through a “digital arrest” scam.
The Supreme Court Advocate on Records Association, represented by its president Vipin Nair, had filed an intervention application narrating the plight of a senior advocate, Hematika Wahi, who had lost over ₹3.5 crore to digital fraudsters.
During Monday’s hearing, Venkataramani placed on record a status report from
the Centre.
The report said that a high-powered, inter-departmental committee had been formed to tackle cyber frauds and underlined the Reserve Bank’s SOP on putting a debit hold on targeted accounts.
The bench asked the Centre to “formally adopt and implement” the Reserve Bank’s SOP “across India for inter-agency coordination, location of defrauded parties”.
It directed the CBI to identify instances of digital arrest and act.
The court expressed anguish at the lack of due diligence on the part of banks to prevent the theft of customers’ money.
“If there is a business entity with crores of rupees, it may not raise suspicion, but take the case of a pensioner who withdraws, say, ₹15,000 or ₹20,000 only, but suddenly from his account there are transactions of ₹50 lakh or ₹75 lakh. Why do your AI operating tools not detect these withdrawals?” the bench asked.
“Banks must realise they are trustees of public money. People have deposited their money because they trust banks…. It is due to the collusion or negligence on the part of some bank officers… banks are becoming a liability...”
