3 held for ₹14 cr digital arrest of GK-2 couple

All three arrested men worked for China and Cambodia-based cyber scammers and provided them with mule bank accounts to route the proceeds of the crime, before converting them into foreign tender and Bitcoin.

The Delhi Police on Saturday said they arrested three people from Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh in connection with a multi-crore cyber fraud case involving an elderly NRI doctor couple, who was “digitally arrested” and duped of over ₹14 crore after they were confined to their Greater Kailash-2 residence for 16 days.

The arrests were made between Thursday and Friday by the Delhi Police’s intelligence fusion and strategic operations (IFSO), officers said. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The arrests were made between Thursday and Friday by the Delhi Police’s intelligence fusion and strategic operations (IFSO), officers said. All three arrested men worked for China and Cambodia-based cyber scammers and provided them with mule bank accounts to route the proceeds of the crime, before converting them into foreign tender and Bitcoin.

Two of them, Divyang Patel and KS Tiwari, had given access of their bank accounts to foreign cyber fraudsters for receiving and transferring the money. The third arrested man, identified as Krutik Shitoli, acted as a facilitator of mule accounts and had also received the proceeds of the crime in his account, a senior IFSO officer said.

The officer, requesting anonymity, said, “We arrested KS Tiwari from his home town, Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh, after technical investigation and analysis of the digital footprints of the cheated money transactions revealed that ₹2 crore was transferred to his account. Patel and Shitoli were arrested from their hometown, Vadodara in Gujarat.”

“Patel received over ₹4 crore in his bank account which was opened in the name of an NGO. Shitoli acted as a facilitator, arranging and collecting bank accounts for the scam. He also received funds from the cheated amount in his account,” the officer said, adding that the money had been rerouted before the arrests.

Deputy commissioner of police (IFSO) Vinit Kumar confirmed the three arrests and said that more suspects were rounded up. “The arrested men are being interrogated for establishing further links in the network of the cyber fraudsters and providers of mule bank accounts,” he said.

The couple, 81-year-old Om Taneja and 71-year-old Indira Taneja, both doctors, had returned to India from the US in 2015. Indira was first contacted by the cyber fraudsters on December 24, 2025, who introduced themselves as officials of the Telecom Regulatory Authority. They told Indira that multiple complaints had been filed against her phone number and that the couple was involved in a money laundering case, which had become a matter of “national security”, according to police.

The fraudsters pressured the woman, and threatened that officers from Mumbai’s Colaba police station would speak to her. Soon after, a man named Vikrant Singh Rajput contacted her via a video call, the couple told the police in their complaint.

The 78-year-old woman, who is a doctor, said the suspects pressured her by repeatedly calling the matter a “national security threat”, and warned that the couple’s life was in danger. Over the next 16 days, the fraudsters kept the duo under surveillance through video calls and messages and tricked them into transferring over ₹14 crore in their bank accounts in eight transactions, the police said.

On January 10, the scammers allegedly told her that she could finally visit a police station and file a complaint.