New Delhi: The amicus curiae in Supreme Court’s suo motu case on digital arrest scams has asked the court to keep WhatsApp out of the proceedings, saying the platform suppressed facts and forfeited its right to be heard. The amicus (friend of the court) has also recommended a “kill switch” to end audio and video calls after a set duration, and has filed a chart showing that most of the recommendations she made to the government months ago are still marked as not acted on, ThePrint has learnt.
The submissions, filed on 27 July, were first reported by The Tech Trace.
The chart, which the submissions call a status of pending suggestions, runs across the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), telecom operators, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the RBI and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C). It sets each suggestion against what the ministries reported over four status reports. On most entries, the recorded status is “no action taken” since the last report, or “work in progress”.
Senior Advocate N.S. Nappinai, who was appointed amicus by the top court, filed the submissions in response to the status report placed before the bench on 26 May on behalf of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
Objection to WhatsApp
On WhatsApp, the amicus has told the court that its intervention application does not reflect the correct position, suppresses material facts and should not be entertained. The platform, according to the filing, knows about the meetings that followed the first round of consultations: a meeting convened by MeitY, a second held by I4C with intermediaries, and a one-on-one meeting WhatsApp itself asked for with the amicus.
That sequence, she says, is missing from its application.
The objection follows a finding already before the court.
In a status report, MeitY said Microsoft acted on intelligence shared by I4C, while WhatsApp had not taken adequate remedial action, and that a large share of digital arrest calls run through WhatsApp.
In its application, WhatsApp has set out steps it says it took, including a 12-week investigation that started with 17 accounts linked to digital arrests and led to action against about 9,400 connected accounts, and prompts that warn users about calls from unknown numbers. The amicus’s submission is that the court should not hear one platform while leaving out others, and that including all of them would only delay the matter. The better course, she argues, is for the court to direct the ministries, which have said any order will be carried out through government action.
The ‘kill switch’
The kill switch is the other headline demand. The proposal is to end a call once it crosses a duration to be fixed by MeitY or MHA, of six or 12 hours, on the grounds that no work or personal call runs that long.
Before that, the submissions seek a pause at the two-to-three-hour mark, when a pop-up would warn everyone on the call that it may be a scam. The idea is traced to victims the amicus spoke to, several of them senior professionals who did not realise it was a scam until the money was gone. Alerting law enforcement to such calls was discussed with the government, the filing says, but was held back over surveillance and privacy concerns. Any cut-off, it adds, would need a gap before the call can be reconnected, since an immediate redial would let the scam resume.
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A scorecard on telecom
The annexure is part of the filing that sets out, point-by-point, the recommendations each ministry has or has not implemented.
On telecom, entries the chart records as “no action taken” include holding operators liable for fraud or negligence by their point-of-sale (PoS) agents, penalties for operators that ignore DoT circulars, using such penalties to compensate victims, physical or multi-factor verification for bulk corporate SIMs, multi-factor authentication for duplicate SIMs, and telling a customer through the primary SIM about every additional SIM issued in their name.
Where the government has reported movement, the amicus notes it against the same entries. DoT has cited its Central International Out Roamer (CIOR) system, introduced in October 2024, which it says blocked about 1.35 crore spoofed calls that month. That number has come down to about 1.5 lakh a month since.
On Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), DoT’s position is that most such calls run through OTT apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, which are not registered as telecom operators and fall under MeitY. The filing records that this sidesteps the question.
On mule SIMs, it cites the draft Telecommunications (User Identification) Rules, 2025, the SIM-binding directions issued on 28 November, 2025 to app-based services including WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Arattai, and a biometric SIM verification system meant to be running across operators before December 2026.
Bitchat, and a takedown days earlier
The filing also flags Bitchat as an example of a service that leaves no trail and yet falls within DoT’s remit. Developed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and open-sourced in 2025, Bitchat sends messages over a Bluetooth mesh—hopping from one nearby phone to the next—with no internet, phone number or central server, so it keeps working even when the internet is cut off.
In the context of digital arrest fraud, the amicus’s point is that DoT should say what it proposes to do about apps of this kind. The reference lands days after the same MHA body at the centre of this case moved against the app on a separate ground.
On 23 July, I4C ordered GitHub to take down Bitchat, its notice saying the app allows anonymous communication without registration or phone-number verification and impedes lawful interception and investigation. The order came after mobile internet was shut down in parts of central Delhi following the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protest march to Parliament on 20 July.
The action went wider than Bitchat’s code repository. I4C also directed Google and Apple to pull Bitchat, Briar and Bridgefy from their app stores, giving the intermediaries three hours to comply, before officials orally told them the next day not to enforce the notices. Dorsey posted that the Indian government did not like technologies like Bitchat and wanted it taken down. That action was based on maintenance of public order rather than on scams, but rests on the same trait the amicus flags—that such apps cannot be traced.
A second block of entries for the operators is also largely marked as pending. These include a dashboard to map SIM issuance in real time and cap the number of cards per person, accountability for PoS (point of sale) compliance, blocking a flagged SIM within 24 hours, quarterly SMS alerts on SIMs issued, and cooperation with law enforcement. Against these, the government points to the same biometric system and to a proposal to cut the SIM-blocking window to two or three hours.
MeitY has a single entry, on standard operating procedures (SOPs) for issuing SIM-blocking orders to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and law enforcement. The filing notes internal consultation and a plan to strengthen the adjudication mechanism under Section 46 of the IT Act through a national portal, but no report of progress after the first meeting.
Also Read: SIM binding: What India’s new mandate means for your WhatsApp & why big tech is pushing back
RBI, I4C and victim compensation
On banking, the RBI entries record its mule-account detection tool, MuleHunter.ai, deployed in 26 banks, the Digital Payment Intelligence Platform under development, and a procedure for temporary debit holds framed after a Kerala High Court direction and circulated within the inter-departmental committee.
The RBI-I4C memorandum for sharing suspect-registry data was signed on 11 May, 2026. The regulator also issued draft directions in March 2026, on limiting customer liability in digital transactions, that propose compensating a victim of small-value electronic banking fraud up to 85 percent of the loss or Rs 25,000, whichever is lower, once in a lifetime.
The submissions record that a procedure for de-freezing accounts within a fixed timeline, and one for closing dormant and mule accounts, show no action taken since.
On reporting and recovery, the filing says I4C has not responded to a proposal to let victims report an ongoing digital arrest in real time, or to run a helpline for such cases apart from the national cyber frauds helpline number 1930.
Against I4C’s entries, it notes two new portals, for grievance redressal and money restoration, and a plan to turn 1930 into a centralised, AI-enabled system. Recovery of defrauded money, it records, remains low.
On victim compensation, the amicus’s proposals are also largely open. These include releasing money to a victim without insisting on an FIR where the funds can be traced, holding operators, banks and their PoS liable where the loss is due to their negligence, and clarifying that compensation through criminal action does not bar civil remedies under the IT Act or the Consumer Protection Act. The filing notes that a sub-committee of the inter-departmental committee, drawing in the RBI, DoT, MeitY, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, and the Department of Legal Affairs, is to study a shared-liability framework and look at models abroad.
Background and directions sought
Digital arrest is a form of extortion in which callers pose as police, CBI, Enforcement Directorate (ED) or RBI officials, accuse a person of a crime, and keep them on a video call while draining their accounts.
The Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of digital arrest cases in October 2025 after a 73-year-old woman in Ambala, Haryana, said scammers used forged Supreme Court orders to place her under “digital arrest” and extort more than Rs 1 crore. A bench led by Justice Surya Kant appointed the amicus and named CBI the primary agency to probe such cases. I4C data show digital arrest cases fell to 17,264 in 2025, with losses of Rs 644 crore, after a surge in 2024, with several calls traced to networks in Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar.
In directions sought, the amicus has asked the court to require DoT, MHA and MeitY to file fresh status and action-taken reports, the government to bring in the kill switch through the relevant ministries, the RBI to set up a cooling-off period for suspicious transactions and report before the next hearing, and the compensation sub-committee to place a shared-liability and victim-compensation framework before the court. The amicus has also sought that courts and law enforcement release frozen proceeds of crime to victims within six months, and that the case be heard within two weeks.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
Also Read: After 465% spike in 2024, MHA data shows digital arrest scams are on a decline in India