Shillong lawyer duped of Rs 90,000 in AI voice scam mimicking senior advocate

Shillong, Nov 25: A lawyer was duped of Rs 90,000 after receiving an AI-generated voice call "mimicking her senior" recently. The lawyer transferred the amount as the Al voice asked her to do so. Justice HS Thangkhiew, Judge Incharge of the Meghalaya State Judicial Academy, narrated the incident during a training programme on "Cybercrime & the Court: Law, Evidence & Practice" for judicial officers at the High Court of Meghalaya recently. Later during the investigation, it was found the fraudulent transaction, validated through an OTP, was traced through multiple numbers linked to Bihar and Haryana. This led to the arrest of a man whose SIM card was misused. Justice Thangkhiew said the arrested man was "just a pawn and had no idea his number was being used." Justice Thangkhiew said, cybercrime investigations often require coordination among several agencies, particularly when bank accounts are frozen to prevent fund movement. In some cases, he said, innocent individuals suffer when their accounts are incorrectly frozen, disrupting their livelihoods. Modern crimes, such as these, no longer require physical presence of the criminals and these are often transnational and involve victims across jurisdictions and lack traditional forms of evidence such as eyewitnesses, he noted. Justice Thangkhiew said that the conventional tools used by law-enforcement agencies and courts have be-come inadequate in dealing with these evolving threats. Referring to the amendments in the Indian criminal justice system, including the replacement of the Indian Penal Code, CrPC and Evidence Act with three new laws, he said these were done to ad-dress issues of jurisdiction, of-fences and electronic evidence. "These changes are necessary to keep pace with technological advances," he said adding, that technology has become an integral part of daily life, especially during online banking, shopping and other works in the digital age and space.