New Delhi: When cyber law expert Pavan Duggal asked the audience at a TOI Townhall on Saturday that who had lost money online, one hand went up after the other. The advocate assured them that they were not alone.He shared real cases, including that of a 72-year-old man, a director of a company, who had lost nearly Rs 9 crore in an investment scam after liquidating his fixed deposits.He had received a call — “Why invest in FD or mutual funds when you can get 16% profit per week? Start with investing just Rs 5,000 per week now!” With smaller investments ranging from Rs 5 to 50 lakh, he received his due returns. He realised that he was being scammed only after liquidating all his FDs to invest more.The atmosphere at the townhall was alive with curiosity and concern as senior citizens, women, and children spent their weekend listening intently, waited for their turn to speak and shared their close calls with cyber fraud — each story a reminder of the hidden risks in everyday digital life.Duggal explained how cybercrime losses had grown steadily from thousands to lakhs and now to crores, and spoke about how criminals misused the lack of people’s knowledge about the newly enacted Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita by threatening victims with “digital arrest”.Drawing a parallel with the Covid-19 period, he explained how the fear instilled in people at the time was still used as a tool to trap them.Cyber criminals mainly target money and personal data that may grant them access to money or can be monetised by others. Duggal spoke of a 65-year-old senior criminal lawyer who ended his life after being cheated. He couldn’t bear that he had spent decades of his life practising criminal law, but got defrauded of his life savings, Duggal said.He warned against oversharing on social media, overdependence on AI tools and careless downloading of apps seeking unnecessary permissions as well as making payments online. He urged people to adopt daily habits of being suspicious and miserly, and stressed the importance of cyber resilience and timely reporting through official cybercrime channels.In 2024, when BNS was implemented, cybercrooks took it as an opportunity to make up non-existing clauses and threaten people with fake legal action such as digital arrest.”Online criminals are only getting smarter by the day, new scams are coming up every day, and if you think these crooks will select somebody randomly, chances are that is not true,” the cyber expert said. Victims are often profiled before they are approached, he added while giving the example of a man who received a deepfake video of his wife, which sounded and looked exactly like her, asking for help. In a similar case, a father had received a deepfake video of his daughter who was “kidnapped”.After paying Rs 15 lakh as ransom, he found out that she was safe at her school the whole time.Duggal asked people to be wary of what they put out on social media — “internet never forgets”. A 15-year-old student said this was what resonated most with her and that she learnt boundaries better today. After the session concluded, a group of senior citizens circled around ACP Anil Sharma to clear their doubts.
