Supreme Court orders RBI, States to fast-track digital-arrest scam relief

Hearing its ongoing suo motu case on "digital arrest" scams, where fraudsters posing as police or enforcement officers coerce victims over video calls into transferring money, the Supreme Court recorded that complaints on the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal had fallen from 1,23,672 in 2024 to 16,377 by mid-2026, but held that the mechanisms already in place need wider adoption rather than a pause. The Court directed the RBI to adopt, within four weeks, a Standard Operating Procedure for banks to place temporary debit holds on accounts linked to mule-account and cyber-fraud activity, and to implement a delayed-transaction and lagged-credit safeguard for electronic banking. All States and Union Territories were directed to operationalise, within four weeks, their State Cybercrime Coordination Centres and the e-Zero FIR mechanism, and to publicise the Ministry of Home Affairs' Grievance Redressal and Money Restoration Modules, under which 57 banks and all States had together restored Rs. 18.05 crore to victims.

The Court asked the Inter-Departmental Committee to examine lowering the CBI's current Rs. 10 crore threshold for taking up investigation, to consider a shared-liability and victim-compensation framework, and to study a technical "kill switch" for suspicious audio and video calls. The Registrars General of all High Courts were directed to publicise the grievance mechanism to courts handling bank-account freezing orders in cyber-fraud cases.