NEW DELHI: Supreme Court docket has taken suo motu cognizance of spiraling incidents of seamsters suing ‘digital arrest’ to extort cash from residents, particularly senior residents, after a septuagenarian girl from Ambala made a beginning criticism – orders of SC have been solid by scammers to con her into parting with over Rs 1 crore of her hard-earned cash.The complainant, a 73-year-old girl from Ambala in Haryana, wrote a criticism to the CJI BR Gavai alleging that the seamsters produced a solid order of the SC purportedly handed by the earlier CJI Sanjiv Khanna to place her on digital arrest and extort greater than Rs 1 crore to set her free.The CJI and senior judges of the SC took critical be aware of the audacity of the seamsters to forge court docket orders, that too of the very best court docket of the land, to resort to ‘digital arrest’, a phenomenon unknown to legislation, in operating extortion rackets throughout the nation.The suo motu petition titled “In re: Victims of Digital Arrest Associated to Solid Paperwork” will probably be taken up by a bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi on Friday to determine whether or not the state police is competent. sufficient to cope with the menace of ‘digital arrest’ rip-off or it required to be entrusted to central probe companies outfitted to make a country-wide probe.The weird spike in incidents of digital arrest in recent times and the victims being susceptible senior residents, the SC would additionally take into account whether or not judicial monitoring of the probe is required to present the investigations the specified swiftness and convey the culprits to ebook.The Nationwide Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP) had recorded 2,746 reported circumstances of digital arrest throughout Jan-Aug 2024, which practically doubled to 4,439 circumstances in Jan-Aug 2025. The authorities have been issuing commercials making residents conscious of the fraud and advising them to disregard threats of ‘digital arrest’ whereas reporting the incidents to police involved.The federal government companies had blocked over 1,700 Skype IDs and 59,000 WhatsApp accounts utilized in these scams. Official statistics reveal that seamsters extorted practically Rs 25 billion from residents by ‘digital arrest’.