A retired judge in Hyderabad was cheated out of nearly ₹1.9 crore after fraudsters posing as police and other officials held him under what is known in India as a “digital arrest”, according to police and local reports. Ganpat Singh Bhandari was told his name had surfaced in a fake investigation linked to hawala transactions in Mumbai, and the callers kept him on video and voice calls while pressuring him to move money into accounts and investments they controlled.
According to the complaint, the scam began on July 28, when Bhandari received a video call from a man dressed as a police officer. The caller claimed there had been a ₹50 crore hawala case in Mumbai and said ₹40 lakh had been found in an account linked to Bhandari. Other callers then joined in, posing as RBI officials and bank staff, and used the pretence of verification to obtain details of his accounts and investments.
Police said the fraudsters repeatedly escalated the pressure, instructing Bhandari not to tell family members what was happening. Over several transactions, he transferred large sums, including ₹22.17 lakh and ₹28.34 lakh on August 3, followed by two transfers of ₹40 lakh each and two more of ₹30 lakh each. By the time the payments stopped, the total loss had risen to about ₹1.9 crore.
The scheme might have gone further if not for a bank manager’s intervention. On August 10, the fraudsters turned their attention to roughly ₹1.5 crore in Bhandari’s SBI account and pressed for that money to be moved as well. When he went to the bank, staff became suspicious of the size and pattern of the transactions, blocked the transfer and warned him that he was being cheated.
The case fits a pattern that cybercrime officers have been warning about for months. In a separate Hyderabad case reported by NDTV, a 69-year-old retired district judge lost more than ₹1 crore in a similar scam, while The New Indian Express reported that a retired sessions judge in Telangana was tricked out of ₹1.66 crore after nearly 10 days of coercive calls. In another case cited by The Indian Express, fraudsters are alleged to have laundered money through cryptocurrency after a retired principal was duped of ₹3.03 crore. Police say the common thread is intimidation: scammers impersonate law enforcement, invent serious charges and push victims into hasty transfers.
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