SC to RBI: mule SOP in 4 weeks
The Supreme Court has reportedly told the RBI to draft and circulate a standard operating procedure on mule accounts within four weeks, alongside faster rollout of existing cyber-fraud grievance and money-restoration systems. The Centre says those modules already exist; the Court appears to be saying: use them, everywhere, now.
The Court has asked institutions to make existing cyber-fraud tools work uniformly.
Content type: news
The Supreme Court has, according to a report, directed the Reserve Bank of India to prepare and circulate within four weeks an SOP to deal with “mule accounts/accounts linked to money laundering activity and cyber-enabled fraud,” with a copy to go to every High Court Registrar General. The case is titled “In Re: Victims of Digital Arrest Related to Forged Documents.” The Court’s full order was not available on the Court website at the time of writing; quotations are from the report and await primary-document verification.
The same hearing reportedly pushed states, UTs and law-enforcement to adopt and operationalise two existing tools: the Grievance Redressal Module and the Money Restoration Module under the national cybercrime framework, and to publicise them. The Union Home Ministry says these modules have been functional since April 2026 under its NCRP-CFCFRMS SOP. By the Centre’s count up to 30 June 2026, over ₹11,158 crore was “saved” across 32.80 lakh complaints, with 1,586 entities onboarded. Those are government-reported figures, not audited accounts.
Victims are to be encouraged to use the grievance mechanism first, the report quotes the Court as saying, without losing the right to other legal remedies. The bench also reportedly sought faster handling of bank-freeze matters, adoption of e-Zero FIR in consultation with I4C, and state- and bank-wise data on grievances, restoration orders and amounts restored. An inter-departmental committee is to consult banks on digital-arrest scams and examine shared-liability and victim-compensation frameworks, per the report.
What this means for Telangana readers is simple: the tools exist; the order is a shove to make them work uniformly. Delhi has published the SOP; now regulators and states have to match the press release with delivery.