Judiciary acted proactively on digital arrest scams, didn't wait for Parliament: CJI

Speaking in London, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said the Supreme Court has moved swiftly against the digital arrest scam. He said courts must tackle emerging fraud while upholding due process and individual rights.CJI Surya Kant said India’s response to economic forms of crime has developed through laws, institutions and judicial principles working together. (File photo)Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant said on Saturday that the Indian judiciary has responded proactively to new forms of economic crime, including the digital arrest scam, instead of waiting for Parliament to step in.Speaking in London at the closing session of the 43rd International Symposium on Economic Crime, he said India’s response to such offences has developed through laws, institutions and judicial principles working together.He said the Supreme Court had recently taken note of the digital arrest scam, in which fraudsters pose as police officers, judicial officials or bureaucrats on video calls to cheat people. The court, he said, has asked the Centre and the states to assess the scale of the problem and consider creating a separate offence with penalties linked to the harm caused."In response, the court has directed the Union and the states to evaluate the extent of this problem and has called for the establishment of a distinct offence, with penalties proportionate to the harm inflicted," he said. "This exemplifies a broader pattern: an Indian judiciary that proactively responds to emerging fraudulent schemes, rather than waiting for Parliament to address them," he added.Kant said India’s modern response to economic crime was best seen not as one law, but as "a layered architecture, built deliberately over successive decades", with legislation, institutions and judicial doctrine each doing separate work. He referred to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, and the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018 At the same time, he said these systems were not beyond criticism. "I must note that these are not infallible mechanisms. Numerous individuals have alleged misuse of the PMLA process by investigating authorities, including claims of arrests made without articulated reasons, and of custody extended beyond what the existing facts appear to justify. In each such instance, the judiciary has intervened to rectify the situation," he said.He also referred to the Supreme Court’s ruling that the grounds for arrest must be given to the accused in writing, and not merely read out.Referring to the court’s ruling in AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal versus CBI, Kant said, "The court upheld the legality of the arrest but nonetheless granted bail, based on the principle that prolonged pre-trial detention should not be transformed into punishment under a different guise."He said that despite legal and technological changes over the years, the court had consistently insisted that due process, proportionality and the presumption of innocence must remain central to its jurisprudence.On insolvency law, Kant said the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, operates alongside criminal proceedings, and that the Indian justice delivery system has become increasingly comfortable allowing parallel civil recovery even when a criminal trial moves slowly.The CJI also underlined the value of international cooperation, saying, "India has learned through hard experience that Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties with other countries, however imperfect their machinery and modalities, bring a recovered asset home far more reliably than extradition ever does. Illicit wealth, after all, rarely stays where it was stolen."He said that if global estimates on money laundering were even roughly correct, enough money was laundered in a year to buy every one of the world’s eight billion people a modest laptop and still leave some money behind. "And of that immense tide of illicit wealth, by the most generous reckoning, less than one unit in a hundred is ever recovered," he said.Referring to Kautilya’s Arthashastra, he said the ancient text described several ways in which a state official could siphon away the treasury, before adding a line that, he said, would still be familiar today: "it is as impossible for an official to handle the king’s revenue and take nothing from it as it is akin to holding honey or poison upon the tip of the tongue and taste neither."Kant said illicit wealth and economic crime do not respect national borders, and called for vigilance, cooperation and adherence to the rule of law.Concluding his address, he said the success of the symposium would depend not on how well the problem had been described, but on how seriously each jurisdiction worked to end it.- EndsPublished By: India Today Web Desk Published On: Aug 30, 2026 07:24 IST