The OTP Phones Behind a ₹1.12 Crore Digital Arrest

Mumbai Cyber Police arrested six people on Thursday, September 17, after a 68-year-old Dahisar businessman lost ₹1.12 crore in a digital arrest. Callers kept him on WhatsApp video for 14 days, from July 30 to August 12, first as Department of Telecommunications staff and then as police.

The men in custody were not the fake officer on that call. Police say they ran mule accounts, OTP handsets, a Dadar gold-company account, and a cash run to Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh.

14 Days of WhatsApp Video and a Fake Supreme Court File

North Cyber Police Station registered the case as Crime Register No. 186/2026 after the victim’s daughter found the transfers and called the cybercrime helpline. Police say the first pitch was that his Aadhaar had been misused in a money-laundering case in Delhi, and that a notice had gone out in the name of the Supreme Court.

An impersonator using the name Vijay Khanna then held him on video in a police uniform, with fake papers that carried official logos. One file, police said, was headed “Govt Affairs, Supreme Court of India.” The callers told him the live case involved ₹238 crore. They warned that his family would be arrested if he talked, and they made him report his location every two hours so he would not leave the house.

Once that fear held, they asked about his bank accounts and fixed deposits and told him to cash the deposits and send the money to accounts they named. He transferred ₹1.12 crore. When his daughter confronted the caller, Khanna told her to go to the police. That name is not on the arrest list.

Mumbai Police have since repeated a line the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre put in writing last year: there is no concept of Digital Arrest under Indian law. No CBI, Enforcement Directorate or Reserve Bank officer arrests anyone over a video call. The March 6, 2025 advisory, numbered TAU/ADV/003, also tells people not to share bank details on the phone and to dial 1930.

THE 14 DAYS IN DAHISAR

1. July 30, 2026: Callers posing as DoT officials contact the retired Dahisar businessman and put him on WhatsApp video.
2. July 30 to August 12, 2026: An impersonator named Vijay Khanna holds him under fake police video, sends forged court papers, demands a location ping every two hours, and pushes him to cash fixed deposits.
3. August 12, 2026: The video-call window police later cited comes to an end, with ₹1.12 crore already gone.
4. August 2026: The daughter finds the fraud, the family rings the helpline, and North Cyber Police Station files Crime Register No. 186/2026.
5. September 17, 2026: Police announce six arrests on the mule, OTP and gold-account trail, and DCP Bajrang Bansode describes the group as a syndicate.

Senior Inspector Pramod Kamble and Inspector Sunil Lokhande ran the money trail under Bansode. The fake cop on the call was replaceable. The accounts and the phones were not.

The Dadar Gold Firm With ₹1 Lakh Capital

Investigators followed a chunk of the ₹1.12 crore into the bank account of a gold-trading company. Police identified that firm as Abhay Dev Gold Private Limited and arrested one of its directors, Rajeshkumar Mohanlal Jain, 54.

Corporate records list the company as CIN U32119MH2023PTC398443, incorporated on March 1, 2023, with registered office at Plot-165/169, Bhagwan Bhavan, Dadasaheb Phalke Road, Dadar East, Mumbai. Paid-up capital is ₹1 lakh. The two directors on file are Jain and Ghanshyam Ishwar Solanki. Police have not named Solanki among the six arrested.

They have named the SIMs. Officers said the mobile numbers of two directors were linked to the gold firm’s bank account, and that both SIM cards were in the hands of Mohammed Tariq Anwar Momin, 49. Police say Momin opened and ran mule accounts, the pass-through accounts used to receive stolen credits and move them on before a freeze can land.

A company with ₹1 lakh on its books is a cheap place to park a large inbound transfer that needs to look like trade. Gold, once bought or booked against that credit, is hard to claw back. That is why a Dadar jeweller’s account matters more here than the costume on the WhatsApp call.

Cash Left the Banks in Bijnor

Momin did not only hold the SIMs. Police say he put both cards into two new handsets and passed those phones to Shikhar Mukesh Tyagi, 28, an operations manager at IndusInd Bank, named as Shakar Tyagi in Thursday’s briefing. The handsets received the OTPs that banks send when money moves. Tyagi and web developer Gaurav Mahesh Goyal, 40, then gave other members of the group access to those phones, police said.

The handset carrying Jain’s SIM went to Chintankumar Sureshbhai Desai, 46. Desai flew with it from Mumbai to Delhi and travelled on to Bijnor. From there, police say, part of the credit in the gold-firm account was drawn as cash and part was pushed into further mule accounts. Ajay Kumar Kaliprasad Sharma, 35, handled more phones for the same group.

Bansode, the DCP for cyber crime, did not lead with degrees when he described the arrests. He listed the jobs on the money path.

A digital arrest offense was registered at the North Cyber Police Station of Mumbai Cyber in August. During its investigation, we found out that a syndicate was running this. In its investigation, the mule account used for siphoning money from digital arrests, the mule account holder, its owner, the person who made such mule accounts, his co-accused, the person who coordinated all of them, and the person who transferred and used the OTPs coming to the mule account to run this racket, we have arrested six people associated with this syndicate in this case.

Bajrang Bansode, DCP Cyber Crime, Mumbai

That is the whole method in one breath. Someone books the mule. Someone owns the receiving account. Someone sits on the OTP phone. Someone carries the live SIM to a town where cash can leave the branch before Mumbai can freeze it.

THE SIX ON THE MONEY TRAIL

Thursday’s briefing also used the short forms Rakesh Jain, Tarik Momin, G. Gohel and Chintan Desai for four of those men. Police booked the group under cheating and impersonation provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and under Sections 66(C) and 66(D) of the Information Technology Act.

Why an IIT Graduate Sat on This Circuit

Police describe Goyal, named as G. Gohel in the first briefing, as a web developer with a BE from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Bandra police had booked him in a separate cheating case in 2021. Tyagi, at 28, held an operations job inside a private bank. Those two facts are why the arrests travelled. They are also why the money moved.

Every transfer the victim made had to clear an OTP. A bank operations manager who can hold the handset that receives that code is more useful to a mule network than a forged uniform. A developer who can keep those handsets reachable by the rest of the group does the same work from the other side of the phone. The IIT line is a headline. OTP access is the gate.

That is the piece most write-ups of this case skipped. A fake inspector on WhatsApp can be swapped in a day. A live SIM sitting in a staffer’s second phone, tied to a gold-firm account, is harder to replace and faster to cash.

WHAT POLICE TOOK OFF THE ACCUSED

• Devices: Two laptops and 20 mobile phones.
• Accounts: 25 bank accounts opened under different names.
• Papers: ATM cards, passbooks and Aadhaar cards.

Twenty-five accounts in one bust is a full kit for a single victim. It is still a sliver of the mule pool banks already have on file, which is the next problem.

Dahisar Lost ₹1.12 Crore After a National Decline

Ministry of Home Affairs figures released in February 2026 showed digital-arrest complaints falling hard after the 2024 spike. Cases dropped from 1,23,672 in 2024 to 17,264 in 2025, an 86.0 percent fall. Money lost dropped from ₹1,918 crore to ₹644 crore, a 66.4 percent fall.

DIGITAL ARREST CASES AND LOSSES

On those 2025 figures the average loss was about ₹3.73 lakh a case. The Dahisar transfer was ₹1.12 crore, about 30 times that average. Government figures compiled through May 2026 already counted 15,215 digital-arrest complaints and ₹481.1 crore lost in the first five months of this year, which is close to the whole of 2025 with seven months still to go.

Awareness campaigns cut the volume of small hits. They have not stopped a retired businessman being held on video for 14 days and walked, deposit by deposit, through a gold account. The callers still open with telecom or Aadhaar. They still invoke Delhi, the CBI, or the Supreme Court. They still want a location ping and a family threat, because isolation is what keeps a daughter out of the room until the OTPs have done their work.

April 2027 Is the Date Banks Must Freeze Mule Debits

On August 4, while the Dahisar victim was still on those video calls, a Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana told the Reserve Bank of India to circulate a standard operating procedure for mule accounts used in cyber fraud, including digital arrest. The RBI’s draft Know Your Customer amendment, last updated on September 11, answers that order with a temporary debit hold on suspected mule accounts.

Under the draft, a bank that flags a suspected mule credit of ₹1,000 or more must block the debit at once, tell the account holder, and then either release the hold or send the case to police through the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal. Without a later order from police or a court, the hold cannot last more than 60 days. The directions take effect on April 1, 2027, or sooner if a bank chooses to switch on the SOP early. They were not in force in July and August, when this money moved.

Banks are not starting from zero. A Lok Sabha reply by Minister of State Bandi Sanjay Kumar on March 17, 2026, said I4C’s suspect registry, opened on September 10, 2024, had taken in more than 23.05 lakh suspect identifiers from banks by January 31, 2026, and had shared 27.37 lakh Layer 1 mule accounts with participating firms. Those feeds, he said, had declined transactions worth more than ₹9,518 crore. The same reply said the Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System, built for immediate reporting of financial cyber frauds, had saved more than ₹8,690 crore across 24.65 lakh complaints, and that the government had blocked 12.94 lakh SIM cards and 3.03 lakh IMEIs on police reports.

Helpline 1930 is the front door for that freeze. The Dahisar family used it, and police still had to reconstruct a path that had already reached Bijnor. Twenty-five accounts came off this group. The registry had already circulated 27.37 lakh Layer 1 mule accounts by the end of January. The gap between those two numbers is why a 14-day video sting still clears a crore before a daughter can get into the room.

Kamble and Lokhande are still on the syndicate’s other transactions. Vijay Khanna, the name on the fake uniform, is not among the six in custody. The draft mule SOP sits on the RBI site with an April 1, 2027 start date, which is the next date that actually changes how fast a gold-firm credit can be turned into cash.