On the afternoon of April 17, a retired Armyman was settling in for a siesta at his home in Southwest Delhi’s Munirka when the landline in the hall rang.“You have not paid your electricity bill. Call this number or the connection will be cut,” the caller said. He gave the 78-year-old man a number before hanging up.The man thought it odd since he had already paid his bill. He and his wife lived alone. Their two daughters were married and settled in Dubai.Unsure whom to check with, he thought of his children but decided it would be pointless to make an international call over something so trivial.So, he called the number.It was the beginning of a 48-hour digital arrest in which the couple would be harried, cornered, isolated and finally coerced into handing over their entire savings Rs 15.5 lakh to men posing as Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officers using an old scam playbook — the Jet Airways founder Naresh Goyal case.Also read | ‘Don’t leave home’: Kolkata man duped of Rs 3.26 crore in ‘digital arrest’ fraudThe call from MumbaiPolice said when the retired Armyman called the number, a voice told him that his name had surfaced in a money laundering case involving Jet Airways founder Naresh Goyal.“We have found that you gave your account details to Goyal, and all his money was sent to foreign accounts through your account,” he was told, according to police officers.Story continues below this adThe retired Armyman said he had no idea anything like this had happened. He then received a video call from a ‘CBI official in Mumbai’.“A man appeared on screen, claiming to be DCP Anil Kumar from the CBI. He had a fake CBI office set up behind him, complete with a large emblem on the wall, and was wearing a uniform. He and another man, who he called SI Vijay, told the victim that he had been charged under the Foreign Exchange Management Act and Money Laundering Act,” said a police officer.Police said that when the victim pleaded innocence, the men sent him photographs of places around his house — including the entrance to his society and a glass office building metres from his home.“They told him that a team was in Delhi to arrest him unless he cooperated, and that was why they were sending these pictures. But the two men had downloaded the photographs from Google,” said an investigating officer.Story continues below this adThe couple were now under digital arrest. Police said they were sent a fake notice from the Enforcement Directorate and asked to share their KYC (Know Your Customer) details and medical records to ‘DCP Anil’ while remaining on video call.Also read | Bengaluru security guard wanted to target Pakistan Army, arrested on ‘terror’ chargesOn April 18, the scammers claimed to have good news.“We have moved court for your anticipatory bail. But now your money needs to be verified. We will give you an RBI account number. You transfer whatever you have in it. The RBI will return it post verification,” the men told the victim, as per police.The victim transferred Rs 15.5 lakh, and was sent a ‘bail order’ from the Bombay High Court. The call was then cut.Story continues below this ad“When his money didn’t come back after two days of him constantly calling the scammers, he came to the police,” said the officer.A case was registered.Targetting the elderlyOfficers said the spike in crimes against the elderly began in the new decade as families became more nuclear.According to an officer, almost every month in 2026, they have been seeing at least two to three major cyber frauds targeting elderly people.“The problem is even more severe in upscale localities. Scammers and robbers know that many of the people here are affluent, and their children are either in high-stakes jobs that keep them busy or they are in foreign countries,” said the officer.Story continues below this adThe latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data backs the trend of crimes against senior citizens, with Delhi reporting more such cases than any other metro city in the country.According to the data, crimes against senior citizens in Delhi dipped marginally, from 1,361 cases in 2023 to 1,267 in 2024. The city, however, continued to top the list among metropolitan cities. The 1,267 cases accounted for just over 30% of the 4,107 crimes against senior citizens reported in metropolitan cities.And the retired Armyman’s case is among the high-profile digital arrest cases registered in Delhi this year. (see box)Also read | Digital arrest: How a maze of 5,436 accounts was used to funnel Rs 10.7 crore siphoned from Pune senior citizenFollowing the moneyDuring their probe, police said the Rs 15.50 lakh transferred by the victim was traced to a current account in Ludhiana belonging to a man named Sarbjit, 38.Story continues below this adPolice picked up Sarbjit for questioning. He allegedly told investigators that he had handed over the account to cyber fraudsters through an intermediary.That intermediary, police said, was Suraj (30).Suraj allegedly told investigators that he had been introduced to another man, Naresh alias Lucky, through Telegram and had ultimately passed the account and its banking kit to him.The trail then led investigators to Jaipur.Police said Sarbjit, Suraj and a third man, a bank official named Sandeep, travelled to Jaipur to hand over the account kit to Naresh.Sandeep (32) allegedly used his banking-sector contacts and knowledge to facilitate the procurement of current accounts. Police suspect these accounts were then passed through several intermediaries before reaching cyber-fraud operators based abroad.Story continues below this adAll three were arrested, and a police team subsequently nabbed Naresh from Rajasthan.During questioning, police said he allegedly admitted that he procured current accounts from Suraj through Telegram and supplied them to cyber-fraud operators based in Cambodia and the UAE.This, police said, revealed the wider structure of the network — people willing to provide bank accounts for commissions, intermediaries who collect and transfer the accounts, and overseas operators who used them to receive proceeds of cyber fraud.The bigger picturePolice said the current account in Ludhiana was allegedly linked to 17 complaints registered across different states and union territories, involving fraudulent transactions running into crores of rupees.Story continues below this adPolice said this indicated that the account had not been used for a single fraud against the retired Colonel, but was part of a larger network systematically supplying mule accounts to cyber-fraud syndicates.Investigators are now tracing the complete money trail, identifying the ultimate beneficiaries and examining the links between the Punjab-based account suppliers and the operators in Cambodia and the UAE/Dubai.High-value scams of 2026Jan: The biggest cybercrime of 2026 in the capital, till May 2026, involved a Rs 14-crore digital arrest of an octogenarian couple — Om Taneja, 81, and Indira, 77 — living in Greater Kailash.Jan: A 70-year-old woman was duped of over Rs 7 crore in Delhi’s Greater Kailash after a week-long “digital arrest” by scammers posing as Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials.April: 76-year-old woman from Alaknanda in South Delhi was contacted by scammers claiming to be from Mumbai Police and the ED. They told her that her accounts had been used to fund the terrorist who carried out the Pahalgam attacks in Kashmir last year. She lost over Rs 43 lakh.