The Wire Talks Senior Citizens Are the Most Vulnerable to Online Scams Such as Digital Arrests and Sextortion | Ruby Dhingra
Why have digital scams become so commonplace? And why are senior citizens falling prey to scamsters?
“We can say that a vast number of people who fall for cyber scams are senior citizens,” says Ruby Dhingra, a former journalist who co-founded Saksham Senior which works to digitally empowers senior citizens.
“There are a number of reasons for this, ranging from neurological factors and the fact that seniors have money in the bank, property etc.,” Dhingra said in a podcast conversation with Sidharth Bhatia.
She gives some examples of the kind of scams that are being perpetrated—from sextortion to investment opportunities to ‘digital arrest’ which has become very common. “A banker in Delhi lost Rs 23 crore to a digital arrest scam.”
“The digital arrest is the scariest,” she said. The victim is isolated from everyone and threatened with arrest if they step out of the house. “There have been cases where the victim is under digital arrest for a month.”
She said most scam organisations work out of South East Asia and the government brought back many hundreds of Indians last year who had been kept there forcefully.