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Policing: Cybercrime, already in focus, will attract greater police attention
“In 2026, we will continue Op CyberHawk on a regular basis intensively. We have seen a massive surge in money recovery and arrests, whenever such coordinated operations are undertaken,” Srivastava said.
Following the second CyberHawk operation, the recovery/ seizure rate of the money lost to cyber fraudsters in Delhi in 2025 shot up to almost 24.97% by mid-December.
THE CHALLENGE
Police in the national capital are bracing for more targeted cyber attacks on vulnerable citizens in 2026.
Over the past year especially, cyber crimes such as ‘digital arrests’ and ‘investment’ scams have been increasingly directed from places such as Cambodia and Dubai rather than the more ‘traditional’ hubs within the country such as Jamtara or Mewat. Once the victims’ money enters foreign bank accounts, it becomes almost impossible to recover, police say.
“The money defrauded by traditional syndicates based in India was often recovered because the arrest of the main operators would lead straight to the money. It is now extremely difficult to locate and almost impossible to arrest cyber fraudsters operating from abroad, and the final destination of the money is rarely traced,” an investigator said.
Numbers tell this story well: figures accessed by The Indian Express show that up to mid November this year, less than 16% of the money allegedly swindled from Delhi residents by scammers could be tracked and recovered. Delhiites lost around Rs 70 crore to cyber fraud cases in just the first six months of this year.
WAY FORWARD
Relentless vigilance is critical, Special Commissioner of Police, Crime Branch & Perception Management & Media Cell, Devesh Chandra Srivastava, said. Back-to-back large-scale operations like CyberHawk 2.0 — which led to 1,000 arrests and the tracing of Rs 944 crore of defrauded money in December — and Cyber Hawk 1.0 in November, were very successful.
“In 2026, we will continue Op CyberHawk on a regular basis intensively. We have seen a massive surge in money recovery and arrests, whenever such coordinated operations are undertaken,” Srivastava said.
Following the second CyberHawk operation, the recovery/ seizure rate of the money lost to cyber fraudsters in Delhi in 2025 shot up to almost 24.97% by mid-December.
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Another initiative will be the establishment of S4C (State Cyber Crime Coordination Centre) in 2026, a state-level version of the Home Ministry’s I4C unit, senior officials said.
Individual cyber police stations are already coordinating with banks. “We will now contact banks and freeze accounts as soon as we receive a complaint, irrespective of jurisdiction. The case can always be transferred later. The first step is to get the transaction ID from the complainant, which is the identifier that allows banks to trace the mule account into which the victim’s money is credited,” a veteran cyber police officer said.
Once the transaction ID is shared, the bank freezes the account to prevent the funds from being moved, including to other mule accounts.
“Many victims file online complaints with incorrect transaction IDs, and sometimes don’t even know what a transaction ID is. We call them, and then push the bank to act,” the officer said.
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