Indian authorities are looking into a complex scheme that defrauded a well-known businessman of $830,000 by calling him to a fictitious online hearing before the Supreme Court of India and threatening to put him in jail, which made him transfer the money.
Even though the internet and digital frauds are becoming more prevalent in India, a police officer in the northern state of Punjab told Reuters on Monday that it was unusual to con someone by hosting a phoney Supreme Court session.
Details of the case became known when police announced on Sunday that they had detained two individuals in response to a complaint made by India’s Vardhman Group chairman, S.P. Oswal, who is 82 years old.
According to Oswal, con artists impersonating federal agents contacted him about being a potential suspect in a money laundering case. Additionally, they set up an online court session in which a person pretended to be Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud of Supreme Court India, and after that, they ordered him to transfer his money into an account so that the inquiry could continue.
Oswal told police authorities, “They made a Skype call regarding the court hearing … as per a Supreme Court order I was directed to release all my funds to into a secret supervision account,” according to a case document that Reuters examined on Monday.
Inquiries from Reuters were not answered by Chandrachud’s office or the registrar of the Supreme Court. Oswal remained silent as well.
On Monday, the police announced that they had obtained $600,000 from the defendants, claiming that this was the greatest recovery in such cases that India had seen to date.
According to Oswal’s case file, he was threatened with a “digital arrest,” a term used to describe a growing practice in India when con artists use video conversations to question victims and threaten to use the victim’s money to pay for alleged crimes they did not commit.
The public was alerted by the Indian government in May to the growing number of “digital arrests” that occur when cybercriminals dress in police costumes and pretend to be law enforcement officials from studios that are designed to resemble police stations or government buildings. Over 1,000 Skype IDs that were linked to these kinds of activity were disabled.
Among the most well-known individuals involved in this kind of scam is Oswal. He is the head of a five-decade-old textile company with a $1.1 billion annual revenue and operations in over 75 nations.