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.

Should the size of transfers that I made all in a matter of under three days not have been enough to raise suspicion and even prevent the crime? Anjali asks, noting that if credit card spends of 50,000 rupees trigger verification calls, why not multi-million withdrawals from savings accounts.

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.

Anjali questioned how her money was transferred through multiple accounts at different banks without proper checks. The police investigation revealed that most of her money was funneled into accounts held by individuals with fictitious identities.

Despite her efforts, recovery remains a struggle, and she still grapples with the emotional toll of the experience as banks continue to shift the blame.

To make matters worse, she now faces tax implications on money that was stolen.

As of now, there is no recognition of such crimes by the Income Tax department. This compounds the victims' financial misery, she says.