‘Reason gives way’: victims describe trauma of ‘digital arrest’
More than three weeks have passed since Indira, 77, and Om Taneja, 81, were placed under a ‘digital arrest’ and defrauded of ₹14.85 crore. However, the highly educated couple — a doctor and an engineer respectively — who lived in the U.S. for 45 years before returning to India after retirement in 2015, still remember vividly how they were kept under “total surveillance” for a fortnight, during which “officers” from the “telecom department” and “Maharashtra Police” grilled and sweet-talked them into parting with almost all of their life’s savings. “They convinced us that we had committed a crime. Reason doesn’t work in such situations. By the end, I felt relieved that my name would be cleared of all the cases. The truth, however, dawned on me when an actual police officer explained exactly what had happened,” said Dr. Indira Taneja. The police have arrested three persons in the case so far — two from Gujarat and one from Prayagraj — and traced around ₹4 crore, of which they have frozen ₹2 crore that was diverted to various accounts. “Two of the accused had offered their accounts for transactions on a commission while the third acted as a facilitator who provided mule accounts to the scamsters,” said an officer, adding that further probe is under way.
More than three weeks have passed since Indira, 77, and Om Taneja, 81, were placed under a ‘digital arrest’ and defrauded of ₹14.85 crore. However, the highly educated couple — a doctor and an engineer respectively — who lived in the U.S. for 45 years before returning to India after retirement in 2015, still remember vividly how they were kept under “total surveillance” for a fortnight, during which “officers” from the “telecom department” and “Maharashtra Police” grilled and sweet-talked them into parting with almost all of their life’s savings.
“They convinced us that we had committed a crime. Reason doesn’t work in such situations. By the end, I felt relieved that my name would be cleared of all the cases. The truth, however, dawned on me when an actual police officer explained exactly what had happened,” said Dr. Indira Taneja.
The police have arrested three persons in the case so far — two from Gujarat and one from Prayagraj — and traced around ₹4 crore, of which they have frozen ₹2 crore that was diverted to various accounts. “Two of the accused had offered their accounts for transactions on a commission while the third acted as a facilitator who provided mule accounts to the scamsters,” said an officer, adding that further probe is under way.
