File photo
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has taken suo motu cognisance of spiralling incidents of seamsters suing ‘digital arrest’ to extort money from citizens, especially senior citizens, after a septuagenarian woman from Ambala made a startling complaint – orders of SC were forged by scammers to con her into parting with over Rs 1 crore of her hard-earned money.The complainant, a 73-year-old woman from Ambala in Haryana, wrote a complaint to the CJI B R Gavai alleging that the seamsters produced a forged order of the SC purportedly passed by the previous CJI Sanjiv Khanna to put her on digital arrest and extort more than Rs 1 crore to set her free.The CJI and senior judges of the SC took serious note of the audacity of the seamsters to forge court orders, that too of the highest court of the land, to resort to ‘digital arrest’, a phenomenon unknown to law, in running extortion rackets across the country.The suo motu petition titled “In re: Victims of Digital Arrest Related to Forged Documents” will be taken up by a bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi on Friday to decide whether the state police is competent enough to deal with the menace of ‘digital arrest’ scam or it required to be entrusted to central probe agencies equipped to make a country-wide probe.The unusual spike in incidents of digital arrest in recent years and the victims being vulnerable senior citizens, the SC would also consider whether judicial monitoring of the probe is required to give the investigations the desired swiftness and bring the culprits to book. The National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP) had recorded 2,746 reported cases of digital arrest during Jan-Aug 2024, which nearly doubled to 4,439 cases in Jan-Aug 2025. The authorities have been issuing advertisements making citizens aware of the fraud and advising them to ignore threats of ‘digital arrest’ while reporting the incidents to police concerned.The govt agencies had blocked over 1,700 Skype IDs and 59,000 WhatsApp accounts used in these scams. Official statistics reveal that seamsters extorted nearly Rs 25 billion from citizens through ‘digital arrest’.
