‘Digital arrests’: Now you see me, now you don’t

Over the past three months, Ruchi Garg, 44, a stay-at-home mother of two in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, has preferred offline transactions to digital ones.

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In August, a 13-minute WhatsApp audio call changed the way she uses the Internet and social media. Like many others in her circle, Garg used to spend up to eight hours on her phone on various social media apps, especially WhatsApp.One morning, after her second son had gone to school and her husband to office, Garg got a WhatsApp call from a number displaying the photo of a police officer in uniform. “I couldn't understand why a police officer would be calling me,” she says.

“The man spoke quickly, saying that my elder son, who is studying engineering in a college in Vellore [in Tamil Nadu], had been arrested in a major scam. He told me that if | wanted to save his reputation, | would have to pay ?80,000,” she says. The money, he said, was to prevent her son’s photograph from being widely circulated.“He didn't let me hang up. He insisted that if | wanted to consult my husband, | should call him from another number,” says Garg. She panicked and sent the money to the Unified Payments Interface number the scammer had given her. “I could hear my son's screams in the background,” she recalls. “Maybe they used Al to generate his voice.” When the caller asked for more money, something felt odd, and she called her son from another number. “He said he was in class. | understood that | had been scammed and hung up,” she says.