New Delhi: The Inter-Departmental Committee monitoring “digital arrest” scams has found that the Rs 10-crore threshold for the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to take up such cases “may not effectively capture organised cybercrime,” and has asked the agency to examine lowering it to Rs 1 crore, and to club together cases run by the same network so that they cross the bar collectively.
The proposal is recorded in the committee’s minutes and the CBI’s compliance report, annexed to the fourth status report filed before the Supreme Court on 3 August by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), in a suo motu writ petition on victims of digital arrest.
A bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V Mohana, in fresh directions issued on Tuesday asked the committee to continue examining the proposal.
The Rs 10-crore threshold is itself recent. As decided by the committee and directed by the Supreme Court on 9 February, the CBI began taking up digital-arrest cases involving losses of Rs 10 crore or more.
At its later meetings, the committee observed that the bar risked leaving out organised networks whose individual frauds fall below it, even as their combined proceeds run far higher.
It asked the CBI to examine the feasibility of reducing the threshold — the action point records the figure of Rs 1 crore — and to consider taking up cases involving the same organised network where the cumulative fraud exceeds the threshold.
Updated details are to be placed before the committee, but no date has been specified for it yet.
The CBI’s report shows how the existing threshold has worked in practice. The agency has re-registered five cases crossing Rs 10 crore, spanning 2024 to 2026 — an FIR in Delhi involving Rs 22.92 crore, two in Gujarat involving Rs 19.24 crore and Rs 11.42 crore, another in Delhi involving Rs 14.84 crore, and one more in Delhi involving Rs 10.30 crore.
Supplementary chargesheets have been filed in some, and all are under further investigation.
A separate digital-arrest case was transferred to the CBI by the Supreme Court on 16 December 2025. In it, the agency has chargesheeted six people—including two public servants—and a company.
It has also received a notification from the Karnataka government for the transfer of a case registered at a Belagavi cyber police station, with the formal proposal being sent to the Department of Personnel and Training.
The report sets out the transnational reach of the agency’s work. The CBI has registered four FIRs and two preliminary enquiries involving the use of mule accounts in transnational organised cybercrime, three FIRs on the misuse of SIM cards, and five FIRs on the trafficking of Indian nationals to scam compounds in Southeast Asia.
It has also registered a preliminary enquiry into a viral video showing scam compounds in Cambodia impersonating Indian law-enforcement agencies. In all, it is investigating 13 instances of digital arrest across four FIRs.
The threshold debate sits within a wider admission in the committee’s minutes about why cybercrime cases rarely end in conviction. While 15 states have implemented the e-Zero FIR mechanism, leading to a rise in FIR registration, the committee recorded that “conviction rates remain poor”.
It attributed this to capacity gaps at the state, district and police-station levels, the non-empowerment of Sub-Inspectors to investigate these offences, delayed or non-compliance by IT intermediaries with directions under Section 94 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and difficulties in attributing SIM cards to their users.
The report separately records that the CBI briefed the committee on a portal it has launched to let the public verify notices purportedly issued by the agency, after scammers were found impersonating CBI officials through fake notices.
The bench has directed that a fresh consolidated status report be filed before the next hearing. The matter is listed for September 16.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)