One of my clients recently had a case which I am explaining below and if you are stuck in such similar situation, here is what to do.
Note: Due to attorney-client privilege, I cannot disclose complete case details or identify the actual parties involved. However, I am sharing the essential facts and legal approach
Note: Due to attorney-client privilege, I cannot disclose complete case details or identify the actual parties involved. However, I am sharing the essential facts and legal approach — the shape of the problem and the law that governs it — with the names, places and figures left out.
How it usually begins
Your bank account is frozen by cyber police, and the way you find out is that a payment fails. Something small. A grocery order, a mobile recharge. You try again. It declines again.
Then you open the app and the balance is sitting there. The salary came in on the first, or the payment from a customer cleared last week. The number is on the screen, the number looks fine, and the money refuses to move.
The call centre goes in circles. The first person says it is a technical issue, wait twenty-four hours. The second says there is a lien on the account. The third, if you push, gives you a reference number, the name of a police station and a crime number you have never seen before. Nobody has called you. No notice has arrived.
That is the point where a banking annoyance turns into a criminal matter. The two need completely different handling, and almost everyone starts with the wrong one.
What follows is the general position. The reason for a particular freeze decides almost everything about it, and the facts of one file can look nothing like the next.
First, work out who actually froze it
Three very different things look identical from your phone screen.
- The police.