NE LEGAL BUREAU
NEW DELHI, AUG 30
Economic crime has changed its disguise, not its instinct. From Kautilya’s ancient treasury officials quietly siphoning off the king’s revenue to cybercriminals today impersonating police officers, judges and bureaucrats on video calls, the methods have evolved dramatically—but the fundamental battle remains the same: how can the law stay ahead of those who exploit technology, institutions and human vulnerability to steal wealth?
Tackling economic crime through global cooperation.
During his visit to the UK, Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant participated in the 43rd @Cambridge_Uni International Symposium on Economic Crime at @JesusCollegeCam, highlighting India’s evolving legal and institutional… pic.twitter.com/POFT2Fp1Zu
— India in the UK (@HCI_London) August 30, 2026
- ‘Don’t wait for Parliament’: Supreme Court’s intervention against digital arrest scams showcases judiciary’s evolving role in fighting technology-driven fraud
- From Kautilya’s honey-and-poison warning to AI-enabled financial deception, CJI traces 2,300-year continuum of economic crime
- PMLA, FEO Act and IBC form India’s layered arsenal, but due process, proportionality and presumption of innocence remain non-negotiable
- CJI warns that less than one per cent of the world’s illicit wealth may ever be recovered, making cross-border cooperation indispensable
- ‘Illicit wealth rarely stays where it was stolen’: Supreme Court chief calls for vigilance, cooperation and rule of law across jurisdictions
Chief Justice of India Surya Kant has offered an unusually broad answer: the judiciary cannot afford to remain a passive spectator until every new form of economic fraud is first converted into a statutory offence by Parliament.
Closing the 43rd International Symposium on Economic Crime in London, the CJI said the Indian judiciary had proactively confronted emerging frauds such as “digital arrest” scams, while simultaneously insisting that the fight against economic crime must remain anchored in due process, proportionality and the presumption of innocence.
His address effectively presented India’s response to economic crime as a living legal architecture—one in which Parliament creates offences, institutions investigate and recover assets, and courts continuously adapt constitutional safeguards to new forms of criminality.
‘Judiciary did not wait for parliament’
The sharpest message from the CJI concerned the rapidly mutating “digital arrest” phenomenon.
Fraudsters typically impersonate police officers, Enforcement Directorate officials, CBI personnel, judicial officers or other government authorities through telephone and video calls, fabricate documents and threaten victims with arrest, prosecution or seizure of property unless money is transferred.
The Supreme Court’s intervention in Suo Motu Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 3 of 2025, In Re: Victims of Digital Arrest Related to Forged Documents arose from a particularly disturbing case in which a senior-citizen couple alleged that fraudsters posing as CBI, ED and judicial officials used forged Supreme Court documents and threats of arrest and property seizure to force them to transfer ₹1.05 crore.
The CJI told the London gathering:
“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.”
And then came the larger constitutional message:
“This exemplifies a broader pattern: an Indian Judiciary that proactively responds to emerging fraudulent schemes, rather than waiting for Parliament to address them.”
The observation acquires added significance because the Supreme Court has not merely commented on digital arrests. It has been issuing continuing directions concerning investigation, mule bank accounts, SIM cards and SIM boxes, intermediaries, grievance redressal, coordination among agencies and restoration of defrauded money.
The Centre has also told the Supreme Court that work is underway on legislation dealing with digital-arrest frauds, with the Court in July calling for the emerging offence to be separately defined and subjected to stringent punishment.
In other words, judicial intervention preceded—and is now helping shape—the legislative response.
The numbers offer a cautious ray of hope
The latest data placed before the Supreme Court suggest that its sustained institutional intervention, coupled with action by the government and enforcement agencies, may be producing results.
According to the fourth status report of the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), placed before the Court in August, complaints concerning digital-arrest scams on the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal fell from 1,23,672 in 2024 to 58,239 in 2025, and stood at 16,377 up to June 30, 2026.
But the Supreme Court has refused to treat the decline as a signal to relax.
Its August proceedings stressed that “continued monitoring remains indispensable.”
That distinction is crucial.
A reduction in complaints does not necessarily mean the disappearance of the crime. It may also reflect changing reporting patterns, evolving fraud techniques or movement of criminal activity into newer digital channels.
The Court’s approach is therefore increasingly one of continuous surveillance rather than episodic judicial intervention.
From digital fraud to the constitutional limits of state power
The CJI’s address did not present the judiciary as simply an enforcement arm in the war against economic crime.
On the contrary, he underlined that stronger action against fraud must coexist with stronger safeguards for the accused.
Referring to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 and the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018, Justice Kant acknowledged their importance while candidly recognising concerns over alleged misuse of coercive powers.
“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.
That formulation captures one of the defining tensions in contemporary economic-crime jurisprudence: the State must be powerful enough to pursue sophisticated financial criminals, but never so powerful that constitutional safeguards become collateral damage.
The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on communicating grounds of arrest illustrates this balance. In Pankaj Bansal v Union of India, the Court held that written grounds of arrest under Section 19 of the PMLA must be furnished to an arrested person as a matter of course, rather than merely being read out. The rationale was rooted in Article 22(1) and the practical ability of an arrested person to understand the case and seek legal remedies.
The principle has subsequently informed the Court’s approach beyond the PMLA context, including UAPA arrests.
Kejriwal ruling: Liberty does not end where economic crime begins
The CJI also invoked his own judgment in Arvind Kejriwal v Central Bureau of Investigation, underlining that a vigorous investigation does not automatically justify prolonged incarceration.
“Furthermore, in Arvind Kejriwal versus Central Bureau of Investigation, a decision I had the opportunity to author, 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.
The September 13, 2024 judgment, authored by Justice Kant, found that although the arrest procedure complied with the applicable requirements, the extensive material already collected and the likely delay in trial supported release on bail. The Court emphasised that continued incarceration pending trial could infringe Article 21.
The broader lesson from the ruling is unmistakable:
Economic offences may be grave, but gravity alone cannot erase the constitutional architecture of personal liberty.
That is also why the CJI said what had remained constant despite changes in law and technology was the Court’s insistence that:
“due process, proportionality and the presumption of innocence remain the guiding principles of its jurisprudence.”
India’s ‘layered architecture’ against economic crime
Justice Kant described India’s modern response to economic crime not as a single legislative weapon but as a deliberately constructed “layered architecture.”
The layers include:
- PMLA, 2002 — targeting money laundering and providing mechanisms for attachment and confiscation of tainted assets;
- Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018 — enabling action against fugitives who flee India to evade prosecution;
- Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 — creating a parallel framework for insolvency resolution and recovery;
- judicial doctrine — policing the constitutional boundaries of arrest, detention, bail and investigation;
- institutional coordination — involving agencies, regulators, banks, telecom companies and cybercrime mechanisms;
- international cooperation — particularly through mutual legal assistance and asset-recovery mechanisms.
The CJI pointed out that the IBC increasingly permits civil recovery mechanisms to operate alongside criminal proceedings.
“The Indian justice delivery system has grown increasingly comfortable authorising parallel civil recovery even where a criminal trial remains protracted.”
That represents a fundamental shift in the philosophy of economic justice.
The objective is no longer simply to punish the offender after a lengthy trial.
It is increasingly to trace, freeze, preserve and recover the economic value before it disappears beyond the reach of the legal system.
‘Illicit wealth rarely stays where it was stolen’
This is where Justice Kant turned from domestic law to the global dimension of economic crime.
Financial crime, he observed, is inherently transnational.
Money can be stolen in one country, routed through several jurisdictions, layered through shell entities and financial intermediaries and ultimately parked somewhere entirely different.
The CJI therefore placed particular emphasis on Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties.
“And finally, like every nation represented in this hall, 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.”
The line goes to the heart of modern asset-recovery policy.
Finding the criminal may be only half the battle. Finding the money may be the harder half.
And recovering it across borders can be harder still.
The ‘one-per-cent’ global recovery paradox
Justice Kant then offered one of the most striking statistical illustrations of the scale of the challenge.
He said that if global estimates of money laundering were even approximately accurate, the world launders enough money in a single year to buy every one of the planet’s eight billion people a modest laptop—and still have money left over.
Then came the sobering conclusion:
“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.
The statistic, whether viewed as an estimate rather than a precise global accounting, captures the enormous recovery gap confronting enforcement agencies.
For courts, this creates a difficult policy equation: punishment without recovery may deliver justice symbolically; recovery without due process may destroy justice constitutionally.
The emerging model seeks both.
Kautilya’s 2,300-year-old compliance warning
Perhaps the most evocative passage of the CJI’s address was his journey back to the Arthashastra.
Kautilya, Justice Kant noted, had written more than two millennia ago about different ways in which officials could siphon away the State’s treasury.
He then cited an observation that sounded remarkably contemporary:
“He then offers a line that every compliance officer present will recognise across twenty-three centuries: 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.”
The historical reference transformed the address from a conventional discussion on cybercrime into a meditation on the permanence of corruption and the changing technology of deception.
The instruments have changed—from treasury manipulation to shell companies, cryptocurrency, phishing, deepfakes and video-call impersonation.
The human vulnerabilities remain.
Greed, fear, authority, secrecy and opportunity continue to form the basic operating system of economic crime.
The sovereignty of money does not exist
Justice Kant also made a larger geopolitical point: illicit wealth respects no borders.
“The very nature of illicit wealth and economic crime was that neither honoured the sovereignty that otherwise shields our legal structures from foreign interference.”
That observation carries particular relevance in an era when criminals can exploit differences between national laws, banking systems, digital regulations and enforcement capacities.
A country may have a strong anti-money-laundering regime, but the effectiveness of that regime can be undermined if the proceeds are rapidly transferred into another jurisdiction.
Hence, the CJI’s emphasis on international cooperation, mutual legal assistance, information sharing and asset recovery.
Economic crime, in his formulation, requires an international response because the crime itself is already international.
The CJI’s final challenge: Action, not oratory
The closing lines of the London address perhaps best captured its central philosophy.
Justice Kant said: “Let this Symposium’s answer be that vigilance, cooperation and the rule of law thwart fraudulence in equal and, I hope, escalating measure.”
And he left delegates with a challenge that went beyond the conference hall:
“In closing, I would say this: the measure of this Symposium’s success will not be the eloquence with which we described the problem this week, but the diligence with which each of us, returning to our own jurisdictions, endeavours to put an end to it.”
That is more than a ceremonial conclusion.
It is a blueprint.
The CJI’s message is that economic justice cannot be measured merely by the number of arrests, prosecutions or judgments delivered.
It must ultimately be measured by whether victims recover their money, whether criminal networks are dismantled, whether stolen assets are traced across borders, whether emerging frauds are confronted before they become epidemics—and whether, in doing all this, the State remains faithful to the constitutional rights it is sworn to protect.
From Kautilya’s honey on the tongue to a fake Supreme Court order on a smartphone screen, the technology of fraud has travelled thousands of years.
The law, Justice Kant’s address makes clear, must travel faster.
