Justice Kant had said the judiciary would pass harsh and stringent orders to strengthen the hands of the agencies against the fraudsters. File.
| Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap
The Supreme Court on Monday (November 17, 2025) forbid courts below from granting bail to accused persons who duped a 72-year-old woman lawyer out of her savings worth ₹ 3.29 crore through a digital arrest scam.
Appearing before a Bench headed by Justice Surya Kant, the Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association, represented by its president, advocate Vipin Nair, said the scamsters had sounded “very real” to her at the time.
A visibly moved Justice Kant said such rank cases of deception of senior citizens deserve “unusual orders”.
“We have to deal with these cases sternly so that the right message is sent. An unusual phenomenon needs unusual intervention,” Justice Kant observed.
Mr. Nair submitted that the elderly woman lawyer had lost her savings in the scam. The accused, who were arrested following the registration of the FIR in May this year, were about to be released on statutory bail.
The court, during a November 3 hearing, had referred to a confidential report to note that fraudsters had already scammed over ₹3,000 crore from their victims, mostly drawn from the elderly population, through ‘digital arrests’.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for the Centre, had submitted that the social and economic impacts of digital arrest scams were “beyond what they had expected”.
Justice Kant had said the judiciary would pass harsh and stringent orders to strengthen the hands of the agencies against the fraudsters.
In an earlier hearing, the apex court had orally mooted tasking the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) with the task of probing the menace of digital arrests orchestrated by fraudsters posing as judges and police officers who use forged documents.
Published – November 17, 2025 11:30 pm IST
