In South Delhi’s upmarket Gulmohar Park, a 78-year-old retired banker, Naresh Malhotra, went under digital arrest for over six weeks without being noticed by his friends and family. Within this time, the ex-branch manager visited three banks where he held an account to transfer a total of ₹22.92 crore in 21 transactions to 16 bank accounts. These gangsters also issued a fake RBI certificate to Naresh Malhotra to make the plot convincing.
Malhotra took permission from the scamsters, who claimed to be officers from the Import Amman Directorate in Mumbai Police, to even withdraw small amounts to make monthly salary payments to his staff. It finally took six weeks for the retired banker to gather courage to report the disappearance of his ₹22.92 crore. He filed a complaint on 19 September, and an FIR was registered on the same day.
“It is as if I was possessed and had lost all my senses. My thinking process was completely taken over by the scammers,” Malhotra told the national media.
Malhotra’s money splintered into several layers via 4,236 transactions, after he himself did only 21 transactions in 16 branches. According to Ranjit Gupta, Joint Commissioner of the IFSO (Intelligence, Fusion, and Strategic Operations) branch of the Delhi Police, layering of stolen funds in a digital arrest case is uncommon.
“We have seen money move in as many as 20 layers. The golden hour of immediately reporting the losses was lost in the case. This makes nabbing the scammers and freezing the funds difficult,” said the Joint Commissioner.
Between August 4 and September 4, Malhotra made a total of 21 visits to three bank branches where he held accounts and made 21 RTGS transactions to 16 bank accounts and deposited cheques worth ₹22.92 crore. These branches included Canara Bank, IndusInd Bank, ICICI Bank, Union Bank, and Axis Bank in states across the country, ranging from Uttarakhand in the north to West Bengal in the east, and Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in the south.
Malhotra had been a senior branch officer for six decades with government and private banks and finally retired in 2020. The three branches close to him included the Central Bank branch in the Local Colony market, just five minutes’ walk away, and the other two branches of HDFC Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank, 10 minutes by car. Even the concerned bank managers could not make sense of this digital arrest when Malhotra was transferring a major portion of his entire life’s investments and savings.
Malhotra’s Testimony
Now surrounded by family and friends, Malhotra calls the traumatic experience one that began on August 1, when he was told by a random caller that his identity had been used for terror funding and he could only be bailed out by the Reserve Bank of India and the Supreme Court when funds deposited in his accounts were dispatched as surety. The caller also promised to return these funds to him in due course.
“Although during the six weeks, even my petty withdrawals for daily expenses and staff salary had to be approved by the scammers… they had taken over my life…,” said Malhotra.
“I told them I will not do a third-party transfer. I put my foot down and said I would go to the registrar of the Supreme Court and deposit ₹5,00,00,000, but not to a private company. They threatened me with immediate arrest. I said, arrest me on my billing, they disconnected the phone, and that was it…,” Malhotra further added.
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