Online fraudsters must be well-versed in cyber psychology, besides being brazen. Your electricity connection will be severed in 24 hours — is the fraudster’s SMS message. If you are weak-kneed and unthinking, you ring him back. He poses as a credit recovery officer of the electricity board and kindly offers to stop the disconnection if you paid to the given bank account the given amount. Common sense should have cautioned the victim that he had paid all the electricity dues on time and even if there were some dues, it would show up in his account. In any case, why the hell should you pay to a private number when the electricity board has payment gateways? The truth is that one takes leave of one’s senses when he is hit where it hurts — pride and sensitivity. The victim and his family are accustomed to creature comforts like 24-hour AC, internet and television. So, he does not think of challenging the bluff of the trickster.

Emboldened by success with petty payments like electricity dues, cyber criminals have gone a step further — posing as authority figures to mulct huge sums from people who are mortally afraid of them. Cyber criminals masquerading as officers from the Mumbai police forced an elderly person in Pune to stay confined to his house due to his “digital arrest”. The scamsters targeted the 73-year-old man ostensibly for “drug trafficking” and “money laundering”, crimes he was innocent of, and defrauded him of Rs 45 lakh. A man in southwest Delhi was defrauded of Rs 19 lakh by scamsters posing as members of the Mumbai financial task force, and how other scamsters placed a retired university professor and an industrialist under “digital arrest”, duping them of Rs 75 lakh and Rs 7 crore respectively. The scale and scope of “digital” fraud seems to have increased in recent times. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has drawn attention to it, advising the public to be aware of the scamsters’ modus operandi through his Mann ki Baat address last month.

Between January 1 and April 30, 7.4 lakh complaints were made as per the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal. The Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centr avers there are several types of rackets — digital arrest, trading scam, investment scam and romance/dating scam. Between January-April this year, Indians lost Rs 120.3 crore in digital fraud, Rs 1,420.48 crore in trading scams, Rs 222.58 crore in investment scams and Rs 13.23 crore in romance/dating scams. According to reports, many of the perpetrators can be traced to Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. In 2023-24, there were also 29,082 card/internet related fraud cases as per the RBI’s annual report. The net or the virtual world confers the fraudsters the much-needed anonymity. Cyber security experts say that that digital arrest mandating the victim to stay put in his house is to enable the fraudster to get his money online through NEFT/RTGS. Many banks prescribe a limit, say Rs 25,000 for 24 hours from the time of beneficiary activation, for sending money. The digital arrest would be for this duration so that a much larger greenmail amount can be remitted. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are godsends for the cyber crooks. Apart from the anonymity conferred by the virtual world, cryptocurrencies pile up anonymity on anonymity given the fact that they are not amenable to tracing by the authorities.

Indians are particularly prudish and cyber-tricksters taking advantage of it by tracking porn viewers and catching them in the act. The truth is in India only child pornography is prohibited but the fraudster again brazens it out with an official-looking court order and demanding money through a convoluted stream of Gmail addresses whereas Indian officialdom is required to use only gov.in or NIC portals. But then when your mind is paralysed by a guilty conscience, you stop thinking.

In the US, people are reluctant to share their Social Security Numbers (SSN) lest fraudsters get to know your entire financial history. In India while the advent of UPI has definitely increased digital payments manifold, its downside has been making the payers vulnerable to frauds and blackmail. Your Uber driver gets to know your bank details when you pay him through the ubiquitous Gpay or Phonepe. If he has dishonourable intents and matching skills, he could dig out your financial history including your PAN and Aadhar details and accost you with authentic-looking catalogues of accusations. We all have skeletons big or small in our cupboards. Don’t we?

The RBI can take a cue from the Post Office Bank which has put in place another layer of protection for online transfers — a unique beneficiary number. It is not enough to identify the beneficiary to whom you are transferring money by his bank details but also by his beneficiary identification number the post office bank has notified you and you alone. In the event, the remittance will not go through unless you start with the correct unique beneficiary number. Cards and their tokenisation are infinitely a lot safer but then swiping machines are not as ubiquitous as cell phones through which small and medium-sized payments are consummated.

If money transfers through a few clicks of the mouse has made money-laundering through multiple layering child’s play, the same online payments regime has been tantalising cyber-goons who have mastered the rudiments of cyber-psychology to greenmail their victims and putting them under digital arrest. While cryptocurrencies indeed are rogues, even legitimate channels need to be constantly tightened to make cyber-frauds difficult.

S Murlidharan is a freelance columnist and writes on economics, business, legal and taxation issues