With online financial fraud, speed matters more than anything a lawyer can do later. Money moves through mule accounts within hours.
The first hour
- Call 1930, the national cyber crime helpline. This is what triggers the request to freeze funds in the receiving account.
- File on cybercrime.gov.in and keep the acknowledgement number.
- Inform your bank in writing, not only by phone. Email the branch and the grievance officer, describing the transaction and asking for the beneficiary account to be flagged.
- Freeze what can be frozen. Block the card, change passwords, disable UPI.
The freeze request works only while the money is still sitting in the beneficiary account. Once it has been layered onward through several accounts and withdrawn, recovery becomes an investigation rather than a reversal.
What to preserve
- Screenshots of the entire chat, call log and any web page, with visible timestamps
- Transaction IDs, UTR numbers, the beneficiary account or UPI handle
- The phone numbers and email addresses used by the fraudster
- The original device, unwiped. Under the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, electronic evidence needs a proper certificate, and that is far easier when the source device still exists
Your bank's liability
The RBI framework on limiting customer liability in unauthorised electronic transactions matters here. Where the fraud is due to a third-party breach and the customer notifies promptly, liability can be zero or limited depending on the days elapsed. This is precisely why the written notification on the same day is so important. If the bank does not resolve it, the RBI Ombudsman is the next step.
On the "digital arrest" scams
No police officer, no court, no enforcement agency in India conducts an arrest over a video call, demands that you stay on camera, or asks you to transfer money to a "verification account". There is no such procedure. If a call is running along those lines, it is a fraud, and disconnecting is the correct response.