Digital Arrests Are Not Uniquely Indian
| AUTHOR | Anupam Manur |
| DATE | August 10, 2026 |
| CATEGORIES | Law Enforcement |
I spent a day recently in a room full of senior police officers, trying to think through the problem of “digital arrest” scams, the ones where a caller claiming to be from the CBI, customs or the cyber cell tells you your Aadhaar has been linked to a money laundering case, or some drugs have been found, etc and puts you on a video call, and keeps you there for hours or days while you transfer away your savings. Somewhere in that discussion, a consensus formed that seemed entirely believable and plausible: this is a peculiarly Indian crime. Some media have portrayed it as such and it sticks. And the explanation offered was a cultural one. Indians have an innate fear of the police, more than other countries and this is exploited by the miscreants. The uniform carries a threat here that it does not carry elsewhere, so the impersonation works here in a way it would not work in Tokyo or Singapore.
I went looking for the cross-country evidence afterwards, and this post is a first pass at what I found. I just want to present some exploratory hypotheses here and not conclusion.
This happens in Japan, Singapore, & US
The single largest category of fraud in Japan today is nise keisatsu sagi, which translates into fake police fraud. Japan’s National Police Agency began tracking it separately in 2025 and recorded roughly ¥98.5 billion in losses that year, about 70% of all money lost to what Japan classifies as “special fraud.”
And it is the exact same script as it happens in India. Victims receive a call, are moved to a video call, and are shown a fake police badge and a fake arrest warrant while being told their mobile number is being used for criminal purposes. In some cases fake warrants have been posted to victims’ homes.
Singapore, which sits at or near the top of every global ranking of public confidence in the police, recorded 1,504 government-official impersonation cases in 2024, with losses of at least S$151 million. Victims are accused of money laundering and told to withdraw cash, buy gold bars, or hand valuables to an “inspector” for safekeeping.
Taiwan is where the script was actually written. Taiwanese syndicates were running fake prosecutor and fake police operations against Taiwanese and mainland Chinese victims a decade before India’s wave began; Philippine police were raiding their call centres as far back as 2014. The United States logged 32,400 government impersonation complaints in 2025 with reported losses near $798 million. The American version substitutes the DEA for the CBI and a Social Security number for an Aadhaar number. Everything else is identical.
The comparison
India’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre reports 17,264 digital arrest cases in 2025, with losses of ₹644 crore. Japan’s fake-police losses that year come to something like ₹5,700 crore, in a country with a twelfth of our population.
Standard caveat though: our reporting is certainly far worse than Japan’s, with one figure doing the rounds is 2.81 million cyber fraud complaints in 2025 against only about 55,000 FIRs actually registered. Adjust generously for that and the gap narrows considerably; adjust further for the difference in per capita incomes and India and Japan may end up in roughly the same place. But “roughly the same place” is already fatal to the claim that this is a uniquely Indian pathology.
It’s not fear then
The countries with the worst police impersonation problems in the world are the countries with the highest confidence in their police. That is the opposite of what the fear hypothesis predicts.
There is a deeper problem with the mechanism. This scam does not work by frightening someone into a single rash act. It requires sustained, active cooperation, staying on the call, not hanging up, not calling a lawyer, moving money in instalments over hours or days. That is the behavioural signature of legitimacy, not fear. People who genuinely distrust the police hang up, demand proof, or ask what it will cost to make the problem disappear. People who believe the police are real, competent and worth obeying do as they are told. Japan is the proof.
What is more likely going on
So, what could be the explanations? My findings in 3 points: The first is that this is a supply-side phenomenon. Indian government data suggest close to half these operations run out of Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. India is maybe targeted because it offers a billion mobile subscribers who speak English or Hindi, not because of anything about Indian policing.
A Japanese broadcaster filmed inside one such compound near the Thai-Cambodia border and found rooms built to resemble police stations of several different countries. The same building had the trafficked workforce working different scripts for different markets.
Here’s a very undercooked second hypothesis on payments. Every country with a serious police-impersonation problem, whether Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, China, or India, is an instant, irrevocable transfer economy. Card-and-chargeback economies fare relatively better. Irreversibility is a genuine feature for merchants and a genuine gift to fraudsters.UPI is one time transfer, which cannot be easily reversed.
The third follows from the second, and is the part I want to think about more. All of these countries also have a universal state-issued digital identity. That combination supplies both halves of the con: a story the victim finds plausible, and a payment mechanism which is irreversible. “Your Aadhaar has been linked to a money laundering case” is extremely believable because your Aadhaar genuinely is linked to everything.
The data in India is incomplete, as expected. But, this tells me that this is not unique to India and it is not because of our fear of the police. The fact that it is run by scamsters outside the country and it is carried out in countries with mature institutions tells me this is something else.