‘They never felt like imposters’: Retired New York lawyer loses Rs 4 crore in digital arrest

When Atul Talwar, 62, was on the verge of transferring $32,000 from his newly created Coinbase account to an Indian bank account, a pop-up on the app flashed a warning: “It might be a scam”. He was alone at his late mother’s house in Noida’s Sector 30, where labourers were carrying out renovation work.

But the recently retired labour lawyer from New York felt he was too far in to back out. He had already transferred much of his savings, broken his fixed deposits (FDs), and feared losing everything if he stopped now. “There were red flags of course.

But never for a second did it feel like that they were not real policemen,” he said in a phone conversation from New York. Talwar had been under digital arrest for 15 days during his visit to India and would end up losing nearly Rs 4 crore.

Fraudsters posing as officials of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had accused him of links to the Pahalgam terror attack and persuaded him to transfer his money, claiming it would be verified by the Reserve Bank of India.

Talwar filed two cases, one with the Noida Police and another with the FBI in the United States. Talwar had moved to New York from Delhi in 1982, aged 18, and gone on to build a career representing labour unions. “I never worked in a firm.

Just with unions, negotiating their contracts and all that. So, I never made much money either,” he said. His savings were largely in two FDs in the US, apart from Rs 10 lakh his mother had left him. After retiring in mid-September, following 30 years of practice, Talwar decided to return to India, where his brother, also a lawyer, lived in Gurgaon.

He had rented a place there and was getting his late mother’s house in Noida’s Sector 30 renovated, hoping to move in by January. “I had a return flight to the US on November 11,” Talwar told The Indian Express. Until then, he said, he had been unaware of the wave of digital arrest scams targeting the elderly in India.

He had barely read about them in the US. On October 16, he received a call from a man claiming to be from Mumbai’s Colaba police station. The caller told him that his Aadhaar card had been linked to the Pahalgam terror attack.

“Obviously I denied it. The man then called someone from the Cyber police while I was on call. That man shouted that I be arrested immediately,” Talwar recalled. The next day, Talwar said he was sent photographs of the victims of the Pahalgam attack.

The callers told him that a Canara Bank account had been opened in his name and that Rs 53 crore had been transferred from it to a terrorist. “They said I got Rs 5 crore as commission. I then received a letter via a WhatsApp number from the alleged Assistant Director of the CBI, titled as a confidentiality agreement.

I was put under 24-hour surveillance through video and audio WhatsApp calls since October 17.” On October 18, the fraudsters showed Talwar two men, claiming they were armed guards arrested near his house. They presented this as evidence of his alleged links to armed terror outfits.

“When I denied knowing them, they said there was only one way to prove it. I had to verify my assets and accounts with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). But my core accounts were in the US, so they asked me to get a new WhatsApp account with the US number and a new phone,” said Talwar.

On October 19, Talwar got his new phone. He then received another letter on October 21, directing him to submit 98% of his financial assets to the RBI. “On October 21, I was instructed to go to Axis Bank, break my two FDs of Rs 10 lakh each, and transfer the money to an account set up by the RBI under Durga Engineering Workshop,” said Talwar.