Judiciary has proactively responded to emerging fraud schemes like digital arrest: CJI

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In his concluding address at the 43rd International Symposium on Economic Crime in London, the CJI said the Supreme Court had recently taken suo motu cognizance of the “digital arrest” scam, in which fraudsters impersonated police officers, court officials or bureaucrats through video calls with the fraudsters.

“In response, the court ordered the Union and the states to assess the scale of the problem and called for a specific offense with penalties commensurate with the harm caused,” he said.

“This is an example of a broader pattern: an Indian judiciary proactively responding to emerging fraudulent schemes rather than waiting for Parliament to address them,” the CJI said.

He said that when we look at India’s modern response to economic crime, it is best understood not as a single law, but as a layered architecture, built deliberately over successive decades, in which legislation, institutions and judicial doctrine are designed to do different jobs.

The CJI referred to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002 and the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018.

“I must note that these are not infallible mechanisms. A number of individuals are alleged to have abused the PMLA process by investigating authorities, including claims of arrest made without articulated reasons and detention beyond what the existing facts appear to justify. In each such case, the judiciary has intervened to remedy the situation,” he said.

Justice Kant referred to a Supreme Court verdict that the reasons for arrest must be given to the accused in writing and not just out loud.

“Furthermore, in Arvind Kejriwal v Central Bureau of Investigation, a decision which I had the opportunity to write, the court upheld the legality of the arrest but still granted bail on the principle that extended remand should not be converted into punishment under a different guise,” he said.

The CJI said what remained consistent over the decades, despite legal and technological developments, was the apex court’s insistence that due process, proportionality and the presumption of innocence remain the guiding principles of its jurisprudence.

Referring to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Act 2016, the CJI said that it runs parallel to criminal proceedings and the Indian judicial system is increasingly comfortable allowing parallel civil enforcement even as criminal proceedings continue to drag on.

“And finally, like every nation represented in this room, India has learned through hard experience that mutual legal assistance treaties with other countries, however imperfect their mechanisms and methods, bring recovered assets home much more reliably than extradition. After all, illicit wealth rarely stays where it was stolen,” he said.

The CJI said that if global money laundering estimates were even roughly accurate, the world would launder enough money in a single year to buy a modest laptop for each of the eight billion people on the planet, and still have some change left over.

“And of that enormous influx of illicit wealth, by the most generous calculation, less than one unit in a hundred will be recovered,” he said.

The CJI said that in the second century BC, the Indian statesman and teacher Kautilya wrote in his treatise on statecraft ‘Arthashastra’ about the various ways in which an official of the state could siphon off its coffers.

“He then offers a line that every compliance officer present will recognize over the course of the twenty-third century: it is as impossible for an official to handle the royal revenue and take nothing from it as it is to hold honey or poison on the tip of the tongue and taste neither,” he said.

The CJI said that the very essence of illicit wealth and economic crime is that neither respects the sovereignty that otherwise protects our legal structures from foreign interference.

“Let the answer of this symposium be that vigilance, cooperation and the rule of law thwart fraud equally and I hope escalating,” he said.

“I would conclude by saying this: the measure of the success of this symposium will not be the eloquence with which we described the problem this week, but the diligence with which each of us, returning to our jurisdictions, seeks to end it,” he said.

Published – 30 Aug 2026 01:08 IST