It all began with a phone call for the Singapore woman who lost SGD 1.2 million (USD 0.9 million) to scammers — the irony was that she was made to believe she was assisting the Anti-Scam Centre (ASC) of the Singapore Police Force.
In this latest variant of the “impersonation scam”, the woman, who has now revealed her story to the media, was scared into submission after she was accused of being a money mule, a person who enables money laundering and other financial fraud.
In her story, as reported by The Straits Times, the 50-year-old victim said that the first caller (on 11 December 2024) introduced herself as a representative of ASC and informed the victim that her identity card number was being misused. Then the call was transferred to someone who was supposed to be a police officer named “Inspector Yang”.
The victim was given a one-time view of the “police pass” of “Inspector Yang”. The pass disappeared after she clicked on it. The victim felt doubtful about the authenticity of this “pass”, but she was browbeaten by the fake inspector.
ST quoted her as saying, “I was suspicious and thought he might not be a real police officer. But when I questioned him, he got angry and said: ‘I have the right to suspect you.’”
At this point, this particular impersonation scam revealed its second dimension: digital arrest.
Victims forced to hand over financial control
With several cases reported from Singapore and India recently, the modus operandi of digital arrest is to make victims believe that they are under the scanner of law enforcement and that they must fully “co-operate with the police” in order to avoid criminal prosecution. As expected, this “co-operation” involves handing over financial control to the scammers, after which the victim is bled dry.
Money lost by victims in the digital arrest scam often runs to huge amounts. This is not a one-time scam in which a victim suffers a loss but then becomes alert. Digital arrest victims have their lives simply taken over by fraudsters, and the scam goes on for a long duration.
Police in India’s financial capital Mumbai told the media yesterday that they had arrested two people for robbing an 86-year-old woman of more than INR 20 crore (USD 2.3 million) by keeping her under digital arrest.
These scammers, posing as “CBI officers” from the Indian law enforcement agency Central Bureau of Investigation, forced the victim to stay confined in her home for some two months and to “report” her location several times a day.
Like the Singapore victim, the Mumbai victim was also made to believe that her Aadhaar (biometric identity) number was being misused for money laundering and that made her a suspect. The victim was intimidated into giving away all her bank details, and over a period of two months — from end December 2024 to early March 2025 — the scammers made her pay them INR 20.26 crore using various excuses, including “court fees”.
“Digital arrest” victims isolated from everyone else
Scammers targeting “digital arrest” victims usually take care to isolate them from everyone else. Victims are forbidden — by the fake law enforcement agents — from talking about this “arrest” with any friends or family members, obviously because then the criminal plot would fall apart.
The victim in Singapore was accused of taking a 10 per cent commission for letting a money-laundering racket use her identity card number to open a bank account. She was told to treat her conversations with “Inspector Yang” as highly “confidential”.
As the victim was pulled deeper into the scam — fake letter with the threat of 60 days’ “detention” unless she co-operated; a second fraudster named “Inspector Chong” taking over from “Inspector Yang” and making even more threats — she felt powerless to resist when told to start withdrawing money from her bank account and start depositing that money into a Chinese bank account.
The scammers had already taken her Singapore bank statements, so they knew exactly how much money she had. The fake officers told her “to help with investigations” by letting her money be used as bait for the money-laundering racket, said the victim, as quoted by ST.
Cut off from family and friends, as she had yielded to the scammers’ demand for silence, the victim just went on paying up, until her life’s savings were all gone.
The victim in India was also held hostage in her own home. A report by NDTV.com quoted the victim’s maid as saying that the woman closeted herself in a room, and came out only for meals. The worried maid eventually told the woman’s daughter about it, leading to the discovery of the scam.
By that time, however, the elderly woman had already been subjected to fake “online court proceedings” concocted by the fraudsters, and more or less been scared witless, making her a pliant victim.
The Mumbai victim was told — similar to the Singapore victim — that her money would be returned to her after the “investigations” were over. Police in Mumbai managed to track down and recover some INR 77 lakh (USD 89,500), a fraction of the money stolen.
India sees sharp spike in digital arrests
As a growing economy with a fast pace of digitalisation, India is seeing the scourge of digital arrest become an epidemic. Every other day, there are headlines about people being duped by fake law enforcement agents, robbed of vast amounts of money.
A report by The Economic Times, a top business daily in India, said yesterday that real law enforcement officials were “astounded” to learn that a digital arrest scam operation had obtained data, including bank details, of 20,000 pensioners across the country.
Frightening a potential victim is at the heart of each digital arrest scam. ET quoted a cyber cell officer as saying, “They seem very organised from step one. They employ scripted fraud speeches, carefully crafted to instil fear and panic, making targets more susceptible to the scammers’ demands.” The officer said that these scripts were “scientifically tailored to exploit the target’s vulnerabilities”.
Calls to digital arrest targets are often made from cell phone numbers procured through fake documentation. Fake companies and identity theft to buy SIM cards in bulk are part of the digital arrest strategy.
Even if some of the fraudulent calls are reported to the police and the suspicious numbers are traced, the racket can still be run with the remaining phone numbers purchased in bulk.
