BHOPAL: Senior citizens in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are facing a new and highly unsettling cyber-fraud tactic, with criminals impersonating anti-terror investigators, placing victims under a so-called “digital arrest”, and extorting huge sums by falsely accusing them of involvement in terror funding.

In Bhopal, the fear triggered by such calls has already claimed a life. Sixty-eight-year-old advocate Shiv Kumar Verma recently died by suicide at his home. A suicide note, purportedly penned by him, revealed the possibility of him being targeted by cyber fraudsters “by threatening stringent action against him for funding the April 22 Pahalgam attack.”

According to investigators, the note and subsequent probe by Jahangirabad police suggested that fraudsters, possibly posing as anti-terror sleuths, had told him that his HDFC Bank account was being used for terror funding. With no one else at home and terrified of being labelled anti-national, Verma hanged himself. Police say it is the first suicide in Bhopal linked to digital arrest.

At least five to seven similar incidents have surfaced in the city involving the elderly over the past 10 days. In Bhopal’s Kohfiza area, another elderly advocate received calls from men posing as anti-terror cops, but unlike Verma, he realised in time that the callers were fraudsters trying to con him. Others, however, were not so fortunate.