An elderly couple in Delhi lost Rs 1.5 crore in sixteen days. Someone called them on video, showed them forged Supreme Court orders, identified themselves as CBI officers, and told them they were under arrest.
The call came through WhatsApp. The badges looked real. The documents looked real. The threat felt real. By the time the couple understood what had happened, the money was gone transferred in panic to accounts they would never trace.
That case, reported directly to the Supreme Court in a handwritten letter, triggered one of the most significant judicial interventions in India's history of cybercrime. The apex court registered suo motu proceedings in October 2025. On April 28, 2026, the government appeared before a bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant with the first comprehensive account of what has been done since.
Meta-owned WhatsApp informed the Supreme Court that it has banned over 9,400 accounts linked to digital arrest scams in India over a 12-week period beginning January 2026, as part of a targeted enforcement drive undertaken in coordination with government agencies.
The scale of that enforcement action tells its own story. While government agencies had flagged around 3,800 scam-related accounts, WhatsApp's internal investigation process led to a far wider crackdown each signal received from agencies was treated as a starting point to map and disrupt entire criminal networks rather than isolated incidents.
WhatsApp's investigation revealed that most accounts targeting Indian users were operated from organised scam centres in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia. Fraudsters used display names such as "Delhi Police," "Mumbai HQ," "CBI," and "ATS Department," paired with official-looking logos as profile pictures to create a false sense of authority.
WhatsApp told the Court it had deployed a suite of new enforcement tools as part of the crackdown, including a logo-matching system to detect impersonation, the logging of account display names, and a large language model trained to identify evolving scam patterns. The company has also built a database of known scam assets to enable faster detection of repeat offenders.
Alongside these measures, WhatsApp said it is rolling out product changes to prevent fraud at the point of first contact, including warnings for suspicious first-time messages, visibility of account age for unknown contacts, suppression of profile photos in high-risk interactions, and enhanced caller information for unknown numbers.
Beyond WhatsApp's actions, the broader government response is taking shape though unevenly. The Department of Telecommunications informed the Court that its proposed Biometric Identity Verification System for real-time SIM monitoring remains at the proof-of-concept stage, with full operationalisation pushed to December 2026 at the earliest. Telecom operators have been directed to reduce the blocking timeline for suspicious SIM cards to just two to three hours - a direct acknowledgment that most fraudulent calls happen within hours of a SIM being activated.
The CBI re-registered three digital arrest cases that crossed the Rs 10 crore loss threshold set by the Supreme Court two from Gujarat and one from Delhi, the latter involving a fraud of Rs 22.92 crore against a single victim.
On the compensation side, the RBI issued draft directions proposing that a victim who loses up to Rs 50,000 in a fraudulent electronic banking transaction may be compensated up to 85 percent of the net loss or Rs 25,000, whichever is lower - available only once in a customer's lifetime. From July 1, 2026, the RBI's Integrated Ombudsman Scheme will raise the compensation cap for financial losses to Rs 30 lakh and Rs 3 lakh for mental harassment per complaint.
WhatsApp has also committed to implementing SIM-binding mechanisms within four to six months a security mandate requiring the active, KYC-verified SIM card to be physically present in the device for the app to function. If the SIM is removed, swapped, or inactive, the app stops working.
Nine thousand four hundred accounts banned. Dozens of agencies coordinating. A Supreme Court watching every step. The digital arrest scam network running out of Cambodia is being dismantled but the speed at which the system is responding still lags behind the speed at which the scammers adapt.
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