Cyber help line 1930
Hon. High Court Bombay, bench at Nagpur takes prompt action to provide relief to petitioner by issuing notice to concerned police station.
In recent past, lot of account holders are suffering from actions of debit freeze of their account or lien mark on their accounts. These debit freeze or lien mark instructions are directly passed by concerned police officers to nodal officers of the respective banks without intimating to the customers.Customers were made to run from post to pillar to get their account active again.
Central Government Ministry of Home Affairs has created one mechanism named as Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Monitoring System, which mandates any victim of Financial Cyber Fraud to Dial 1930, a helpline for reporting financial cyber fraud. Once Victim dials 1930, a ticket/complaint number is created online. Then this ticket gets escalated to Concerned Banks, Wallets, Merchants as per the reporting in complaint. Acknowledgement Number and NCRP link is then sent to victim for submission of complete details of fraud. In the mean, concerned banks/ wallets/ merchants receive this ticket from NCRP portal and they freeze the account if money is available in the account reported in complaint. If defrauded money has moved to another account, ticket gets escalated to other Bank / wallet / merchant and process repeats till money is saved.
The mechanism is designed with proper intension but since no Standard operating guidelines are framed yet, many times innocent citizen’s account also gets debit frozen or witnesses lien mark. In such situation, the innocent citizen remains remediless and clueless about what actions he should initiate to get his account functional again.
In many cases innocent citizen is not at all involved in any of the acts alleged to be carried out in complaint reported to online portal 1930 nor citizen’s account witnesses any credit amount from complainant but still his account remains debit freeze.Such debit freeze of account was challenged in writ petition before Bombay High Court Bench at Nagpur and bench of Hon Justice Vinay Joshi and Hon Justice Vrushali Joshi took cognizance of the sufferings petitioner and issued notice to the respondent Police Inspector, who instructed for debit freeze of the account.
The petitioner, before the court, runs a bar and restaurant, having valid licenses from various government departments and receives money from customers for services provided to various customers. In this era of digitalization many customers make online payment using various apps and payment gateways authorised and regulated by Government of India. Petitioner also avails services of authorised gateways and apps to receive the online payment. Petitioner was communicated by one of the vendors regarding return of cheque issued by petitioner and hence petitioner communicated with bank, to understand the reason behind cheque return when there was sufficient balance in account. On receipt of such communication, petitioner was informed by bank that they received directives from police to debit freeze the account.That subsequent communications with bank as well as police by petitioner to get the account operative produced no results and hence petitioner approached Hon High Court Bombay bench at Nagpur through Adv Dr Mahendra Limaye.
Hon High Court observed that, “We have come across similar type of other petitions, wherein we could see that for a meager amount, entire account of the traders, businessman have been freezed putting them into great financial difficulties. Rather the Investigating Officer would have adopted the course by informing the concerned bank to freeze the disputed amount only, but without application of mind, the entire bank account has been freezed with total disregard to the inconveniences caused to the account holders. We have sufficient reasons to right now defreeze the entire account by stalling Rs.900/- but we feel that before passing any order, we should give a hearing to the concerned investigating agency. Again, our experience speaks that, when the police stations are from other States, despite our repeated summonses and communication, there is no response at all.”
Thereafter Hon Court directed petitioner to communicate the order to concerned police officer and directed him to respond to this Court or to the office of Government Pleader of this Court. The court made it explicitly clear that it was adopting this method only to expeditiously elevate the agony of account holder, petitioner. This action of court is very effective step to provide justice to many such innocent citizen, whose account gets debit frozen or lien marked without their direct involvement in any criminal act.
The petition highlights issue of receiving online payment from unknown persons, without any verifying mechanism being devised by the government for the protection of receiver. Maximum people are using digital payments systems for making payment and many traders/businessman/shop owners are facing such situation of debit freeze of the account.
The petitioner has prayed for directions to Respondent Ministry of Home Affairs to amend the existing mechanism of freezing/marking lien of the beneficiary accounts by formulating proper standard operating procedures including providing reasonable and time bound opportunity to beneficiaries, whose accounts are likely to be affected, to prove their innocence and to frame proper guidelines to make time bound investigation by centralized law enforcement authorities in such instances, with single point of contact for grievance redressal so that innocent citizen should not be made to suffer due to communication with multiple authorities.
Adv Dr Mahendra Limaye represented the petitioner. ASG Nandesh Deshpande, waived notice for MHA