Digital Arrest Scams: Need For a Separate Cybercrime Framework in India

Digital arrest scams have turned out to be one of the most damaging cyber-enabled economic offences in India. In this kind of scam, the fraudster pretends to be a police official, investigating agency, or even a judge over video call and threatens the victim to hand over money to protect them from arrest. Unlike typical cyber fraud cases, in these scams, impersonation, extortion, digital forgery, and psychological harassment of the victim run concurrently as methods to induce payment. Digital arrest scams mostly originate from fraud factories in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, where scam artists are trafficked in. As per government data presented before Parliament and the Supreme Court, Indians have been defrauded of close to Rs 3,000 crore by 2025 in such scams. Moreover, it has been observed that the vulnerable senior citizens are the prime targets of such scams. Indian laws do not have any specific provisions criminalizing such scams; they are dealt with by randomly applying various provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and the Information Technology Act, 2000, which were not designed to tackle such multi-jurisdictional cybercrimes. This paper will examine the legal framework on digital arrest scams, its shortcomings in light of recent developments such as the Supreme Court suo motu cognizance of such scams and its subsequent directions to the Central Bureau of Investigation and highlight the lacunae in the current framework by comparing relevant statutes such as the Protection from Scams Act, 2025 of Singapore and the Anti Telecommunications and Network Fraud Law of China. It will conclude by recommending certain legal and administrative measures to address such scams.