Anjali's* nightmare began with a phone call that would cost her 58.5m rupees ($663,390).
The caller claimed to be from a courier company, alleging that Mumbai customs had seized a drug parcel she was sending to Beijing.
Anjali, a resident of Gurugram, a suburb of Indian capital Delhi, fell prey to a digital arrest scam - fraudsters posing as law enforcement officials on video calls and threatening her with life in prison and harm to her son unless she obeyed.
Over five harrowing days last September, they kept her under 24/7 surveillance on Skype, terrified her with threats, and coerced her into liquidating her savings and transferring the money.
After that, my brain stopped working. My mind shut down, she says.
By the time the calls stopped, Anjali was broken - her confidence shattered, her fortune gone.
Her case is far from unique.
Government data shows Indians lost millions of dollars to digital arrests, with reported cases nearly tripling to 123,000 between 2022 and 2024.
The scam has grown so rampant that the government has resorted to full-page ads, radio and TV campaigns, and even a prime ministerial warning. Officials say they have blocked nearly 4,000 Skype IDs and over 83,000 WhatsApp accounts linked to the fraud.
Anjali has spent the past year shuttling between police stations and courts, tracing the trail of her vanished money and petitioning authorities - including the prime minister - for help.
Victims say soaring scams, weak bank safeguards, and poor recovery expose regulatory gaps in a country where digital banking has outpaced cybercrime checks, ensnaring people across classes.
Anjali says tracing her money trail exposed failures at every level of India's top banks.
She told the BBC she rushed to her HDFC Bank branch - India's largest private lender - on 4 September 2024, panicked and under video surveillance by scammers, transferring 28m rupees that day and another 30m the next.
She alleges that the bank failed to detect red flags or trigger alerts for abnormal transactions, even though the amounts she was transferring were 200 times larger than her usual pattern of withdrawals.
She wonders why her premium account drew no call from her relationship manager and why the bank failed to flag such massive debits.
In an email to Anjali, which the BBC has seen, HDFC called her allegations baseless and said the incident of fraud was reported to the bank after a delay of two-three days. It added that the transactions were authorised by the bank on her instructions so its officials cannot be faulted.
India's banking ombudsman closed her complaint against HDFC, citing a 2017 rule that makes customers like Anjali bear the full loss if the fraud is deemed their mistake.
When we met Anjali, she showed us a huge chart she had compiled of how her money travelled from one bank to another.
It showed the funds first went from HDFC into an account held by Mr Piyush in ICICI Bank, one of India's largest private lenders.
A police investigation into the money trail revealed that Mr Piyush's account barely had a balance of few thousand rupees before the transfer.
ICICI has been accused of allowing multiple fund transfers into the account without triggering any alerts and being complicit in her financial losses.
Victims continue to call for stronger protective measures from banks and a legal framework that truly safeguards against such cybercrimes as they navigate the complex aftermath of digital theft.
As of now, Anjali has managed to recover barely 10m of 58m rupees she lost to the fraud. She is now pleading for exemption from taxes on the money stolen from her, a situation that adds to her financial woe.
*The victim's real name has been changed to protect her identity.
