Anjali's* nightmare began with a phone call that would cost her 58.5m rupees ($663,390).
The caller claimed to be from a courier company, alleging that Mumbai customs had seized a drug parcel she was sending to Beijing.
Anjali, a resident of Gurugram, a suburb of Indian capital Delhi, fell prey to a 'digital arrest' scam - fraudsters posing as law enforcement officials on video calls and threatening her with life in prison and harm to her son unless she obeyed.
Over five harrowing days last September, they kept her under 24/7 surveillance on Skype, terrified her with threats, and coerced her into liquidating her savings and transferring the money.
By the time the calls stopped, Anjali was broken - her confidence shattered, her fortune gone.
Her case is far from unique. Government data shows Indians lost millions of dollars to 'digital arrests,' with reported cases nearly tripling to 123,000 between 2022 and 2024.
The scam has grown so rampant that the government has resorted to full-page ads, radio and TV campaigns, and even a prime ministerial warning. Officials say they have blocked nearly 4,000 Skype IDs and over 83,000 WhatsApp accounts linked to the fraud.
Anjali has spent the past year shuttling between police stations and courts, tracing the trail of her vanished money and petitioning authorities - including the prime minister - for help.
Victims say soaring scams, weak bank safeguards, and poor recovery expose regulatory gaps in a country where digital banking has outpaced cybercrime checks, ensnaring people across classes.
Anjali says tracing her money trail exposed failures at every level of India's top banks. She told the BBC she rushed to her HDFC Bank branch - India's largest private lender - on 4 September 2024, panicked and under video surveillance by scammers, transferring 28m rupees that day and another 30m the next.
She alleges that the bank failed to detect red flags or trigger alerts for abnormal transactions, even though the amounts she was transferring were 200 times larger than her usual pattern of withdrawals.
In an email to Anjali, which the BBC has seen, HDFC called her allegations 'baseless' and said the incident of fraud was reported to the bank after a delay of two-three days. It added that the transactions were authorized by the bank on her instructions, so its officials cannot be faulted.
Over a year after losing her money, Anjali and others petitioned India's top consumer court in January, which admitted their complaint of 'deficiency of services' by banks. The banks must respond, with a hearing due in November.
As such scams get more complex, there are growing discussions worldwide around who ultimately pays for financial fraud - and what responsibility banks, financial institutions, and regulators bear.
Mahendra Limaye, a lawyer fighting cases for victims, including Anjali, accuses banks of indirectly 'abetting the financial suicide' of complainants. Despite the mounting evidence against financial institutions, relief is elusive for Anjali, who has managed to recover barely 10m of the 58m rupees lost, while facing unexpected tax burdens on the stolen amounts.
