Psychological Vulnerability and Digital Arrest: A Conceptual Framework of Cyber Deception and Coercion, With India as an Illustrative Case

Digital arrest, a form of cyber-enabled coercion in which offenders impersonate state authorities to detain victims online, has emerged as a major socio-legal concern in India, and comparable authority-impersonation scams have been reported in other countries. Existing scholarship has largely documented the prevalence of such scams, while the psychological and structural mechanisms enabling compliance remain under-examined. This article develops a general conceptual framework, the Digital Arrest Psychological Compliance Model (DAPCM), explaining how impersonated authority, fear induction, psychological containment, and progressive compliance interact to erode victims’ autonomy, and it treats institutional, legal, and cultural contexts as moderators of these mechanisms. India serves as the illustrative case, grounding the framework in documented incidents, legal responses, and patterns of institutional trust. The article moves beyond documentation toward a theoretical and ethical analysis and calls for validation in other national settings.