'Lost money, mental health': Influencer Ankush Bahuguna on 40-hour-long digital arrest

'I wish I had known in the first five minutes to cut the call,' he shared, calling himself 'stupid' for not knowing that nobody can digitally arrest you, he said while adding the importance of staying in touch with news.

Popular social media influencer Ankush Bahuguna, best known for his Instagram channel Wing It with Ankush, recently fell prey to digital arrest and lost his "money and mental health" after 40 hours of being held hostage.

In a video released on his Instagram, the influencer revealed that he had received a call from an unknown number that started with + 1 and he picked it up without giving it much thought. It was an automated call and he was told that some delivery of his was cancelled and he should press zero for support.

"Biggest mistake of my life," Bahunga told his followers, adding that the caller on the other end told him that illegal items were found in his package that he was sending to China.

While the influencer did not reveal what items he was told had been found in the package, he said it was very scary to hear that and he panicked and was trying to convince the 'officials' that said package did not belong to him.

He was also told that there was already an arrest warrant in his name and that he has to now talk to the police because it seemed like someone else was using his identity.

"He then convinced me that I did not have enough time to go to the police station so he would do me a favour and connect me to the police directly ... and that number said Mumbai Police. I don't know how this call gets transferred to Whatsapp call which is a video call with some police officer."

The police officer on the other end of the video call then told Bahuguna that there were several fraud cases under his name and he had been involved in money laundering and drug trafficking, among other things, after which he started throwing names of alleged criminals at him asking how he knew them and if he had been working for them.

"Even when you know you have done nothing wrong and there is nothing to be scared of, the situation that they create is such that it makes your brain stop functioning," , Bahuguna shared, recalling his experience.

"We will help you prove your innocence," the man in the police officer's attire told Bahugana, adding that if he is not proven innocent then he will become a "prime suspect" in the "national case" and will be detained where "they are going to rape you and beat" him up.

You are now under "self custody", he was told, after which he was on the call for the next 40 hours and was not able to cut that call and had no contact with the outside world. He was not allowed to pick up calls, message, or reply, and had to turn off all electric gadgets in his home.

"I am crying and telling that people are messaging me can I at least inform them," the influencer asked when the man on the other end told him that if he told anybody they would come and arrest him.

"When they isolate your from the rest of the world, the brainwashing begins and they are very good at it. They are also playing good cop bad cop," he said adding that they even took his bank details and warned him that his parents' lives are also in danger.

They even asked him to share his screen and formulated all his replies to the messages he was getting. Moreover, the influencer shared that he was allowed to sleep only with his video on.

The next morning, his friends and well-wishers started to show up at his door. The scamsters then asked Bahuguna to ask them to leave without making them suspicious.

After this, they assigned a "task" to the influencer, asking him to go to a bank while staying on call with them. They asked him to do very "fishy" transactions, but they could not be completed because of some technical issue. After this, they asked him to check into a hotel because his house was "unsafe".

He then shared on the Instagram video that when he was about to sleep in the hotel, he got a pop-up message from a friends and content creator Shibani who told him that it seemed that he was in a house arrest and if that was true, it was a fraud.

Even though the scamsters noticed the change in his expression, he managed to run out of the hotel and called his friend up.

"I am sharing all of this because if you are someone like me who falls for something like this, this is the lengths to which they can go to scam you," he told in the video.

I wish I had known in the first five minutes to cut the call, he shared calling himself "stupid" for not knowing that nobody can digitally arrest you, he said adding the importance of staying in touch with news.

The video already has over 94K likes and over 3K comments where people shared their personal experiences with these fraudsters and thanked the influencer for spreading awareness.

This comes at a time when headlines have been rife with incidents of 'digital arrests' with people being conned out of crores of rupees in some instances by criminals.

In a 'digital arrest', victims are tricked into remaining under constant visual surveillance via Skype or other video conferencing platforms until the criminals’ demands are met.