New Delhi: For almost a year, the government’s answer to “digital arrest” scams included a simple idea: automatically cut off audio and video calls that run too long. Minutes of inter-ministerial meetings, which the Union government has submitted to the Supreme Court as part of its latest status report in the court’s suo motu case on digital arrest scams, show the Centre has now retreated on it.
The top court took up the case on its own in October 2025. A 73-year-old woman from Ambala, Haryana, had written to it describing how fraudsters posing as Central Bureau of Investigation, Enforcement Directorate and judicial officers held her and her husband under “digital arrest” for over two weeks, using forged Supreme Court orders, and extorted more than Rs 1 crore from them. Since then, the Union home ministry has been filing periodic status reports on the government’s response. The fifth, running to 439 pages, includes minutes of meetings between ministries, regulators, banks and tech platforms.
After a meeting with WhatsApp and Telegram, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has settled on a “graded approach” built mostly on what the platforms had offered. It starts with warning messages, pop-ups during long calls and an option to silence unknown callers. The kill switch survives only as the final step, described as “an option”. Even this will be tried first “on a pilot basis, to gauge the efficacy”. No call duration, timeline or platform has been named.
The minutes of the 9 September meeting, chaired by a Joint Secretary in the MeitY, were filed with the home ministry’s fifth status report on 7 October, which ThePrint has seen. Officials from the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C)—a home ministry initiative on cybercrime that became an attached office of the MHA in July 2024—and the Department of Telecommunications attended.
According to the minutes, everyone agreed the kill switch was technically feasible, since telecom operators already run one. Its usefulness, however, “was strongly contested by the intermediaries”.
WhatsApp argued that “any homogenous intervention runs a very high risk of becoming obsolete as the bad actors will quickly scale up”. It called the kill switch “a blunt tool since population-wide measures tend to fail”. A fraudster who knew about a 60-minute limit, it said, would simply end the call at 59 minutes and ask the victim to call back. Scammers already use several calls, from different numbers and across platforms, it added.
The company said the problem needed a “principle-based solution”: a package of product changes that “should not be homogenous and be best left to the platform”. It suggested trigger warnings, pop-up cards at first contact, and warnings during long calls.
Telegram objected too. It said such a change would be “very difficult to implement” because it would affect its users worldwide.
I4C was the only voice at the table pressing for the kill switch. Its officials proposed warnings for unknown callers and a pop-up alert if a call runs 20 to 30 minutes. They argued that a forced cut-off would at least give the victim a “cooling-off period”, even if the fraudster called back. “This is a unique scenario and nevertheless it is warranted that this framework be at-least tested,” the minutes record I4C as saying.
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The middle path
MeitY sided with a middle path that looked a lot like the platforms’ list. The chair “stressed upon a graded approach” for cases where an unknown person had already made contact, and proposed that platforms offer users “an opt-in feature for silencing calls from unknown numbers”. WhatsApp already offers users such a setting.
Meta had set out the same plan a few weeks earlier. At a 21 August meeting with I4C, it “expressed reservations” about the kill switch. Instead, it described changes it was already making on WhatsApp: showing a caller’s location and account creation date on first messages from unknown numbers, hiding profile pictures, turning off video by default for unrecognised callers, and adding warnings during long video calls. Those are, in effect, the first steps of the government’s “graded approach”. I4C asked Meta for “detailed reasoning” behind its objections. The filing does not show whether it ever arrived.
The way the government has reported the meeting to the court also softens the platforms’ resistance. The status report says stakeholders “broadly accepted the need and technical feasibility of a kill-switch type intervention”, with WhatsApp and Telegram raising only “concerns”. The minutes say only feasibility was accepted, and that efficacy was “strongly contested”.
The retreat comes despite the Supreme Court’s push. Its 4 August order asked the IT ministry, Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and I4C to examine a time-based kill switch with the platforms and report on its feasibility, efficacy, safeguards and alternatives. Amicus curiae N.S. Nappinai, had argued that no genuine work or personal call runs for six or 12 hours, and that cutting off such calls would break the hold fraudsters keep over victims.
Earlier this year, Telegram, Meta and Google had told the MeitY that a time-based cut-off was unlikely to stop fraud and would hurt ordinary users. WhatsApp, in a May submission to the government’s committee, said the measure “merely interrupts the technical session”. It added that more than 99 per cent of calls lasting over an hour are legitimate.
What the government has in hand is a kill switch on the ordinary phone network, where scammers rarely operate. DoT told the court that Airtel, Jio, Vodafone Idea and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited already disconnect long calls, at up to 180 minutes. But digital arrest calls are mostly made over WhatsApp and similar apps. The DoT said those fall under the IT ministry.
The committee’s final action point, from its 24 September meeting, asks the IT ministry to ensure a graded mechanism “which may lead up to a ‘Kill Switch’.” On 29 October, the Supreme Court went a step further in the platforms’ direction, asking WhatsApp and other intermediaries to submit their own proposals for preventing digital arrest scams to I4C.
The case will be heard next on 23 November.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)