When Maria’s phone started ringing and wouldn’t stop, she was juggling the countless small tasks that come with waking up and traveling to work in Mumbai. The repeated caller claimed to be from Vodafone, her network provider and threatened to block her SIM if she didn’t present proof of identity right away.
The 54-year-old workplace worker, who was given a different title at her request, was about to add to the legion of Indians who had recently fallen victim to advanced online fraud.
His repeated calls were keeping her up at night, and she couldn’t understand the stern voice at the other end of the line. Maria handed her brother the smartphone out of anger, and he complied with the caller’s request. Maria says, “In retrospect, that was a mistake.”
Fraudsters maxed out her credit card and emptied her savings account in less than 72 hours, taking a total of Rs330,000 (now worth almost $4,000).
Maria had not heard of these types of frauds before, and according to experts, criminals steal millions of rupees annually from foolish victims.
According to Balsing Rajput, Mumbai’s deputy commissioner of police for computer crime, “the rise in cases of cybercrime is huge.” The lack of awareness of the people is being exploited by criminals, according to many Indians who are now using smartphones and online finance for the first time.
India has been at the forefront of digitally enabled economic inclusion thanks to the development of a lightning-fast digital payments system and the country’s passionate embrace of online banking over the past ten years.
However, due to the quick advancement, authorities are rushing to raise financial literacy while law enforcement organizations are struggling to keep up.
According to the National Crime Records Bureau, more than 60% of the nearly 53,000 computer murder cases registered in 2021—the most recent data available—were thefts. However, given that some minimal frauds go unreported, the actual level is probably much higher.
The Reserve Bank of India classified nearly half of frauds involving Rs100,000 ($1,200) or more in the previous fiscal year as “card/internet” fraud. That is an increase from only over one-third in 2020–21.
Automatic money transfers between people and businesses are now possible thanks to India’s Unified Payments Interface, which was introduced in 2016. The incredibly well-liked energy, which is commonly used for smaller payments to friends or street vendors, recorded over 10 billion transactions in August 2023 alone.
Digital banks are also becoming more popular, especially after the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi abruptly stopped issuing some bills in 2016 and forced many people who had never opened accounts to do so in order to deposit soon-to-be phased-out cash. Cyber fraud has increased along with UPI and online banking.
According to Aimée Allam, executive chairman of the FT’s Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign, the development of electronic payments technology is a potent tool for increasing financial inclusion globally. However, it also exposes people to more unusual types of theft and fraud. People can better protect themselves the more informed they are of those challenges.
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The con artists who were after Maria were taking advantage of her victim’s ignorance and the convenience of online banking. Maria thinks the thieves have restored her password and authenticated it using “one-time passwords” that were sent to her wireless device to access her accounts. The thieves had tricked her son into letting them copy her SIM card so they could get those OTPs.
Maria went up to the police, who told her to go to Mumbai’s Department of cybercrime. Despite the fact that they noted her circumstances, there was no follow-up. There are some breaches in the officers, they do not file occasionally, according to Rajput, who claimed that circumstances are frequently ignored by overworked officers.
However, India is retaliating. According to Rajput, operating a computer violence hotline in Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, the nation’s economic center, has resulted in daily freezes of fraudulent transactions totaling between Rs500,000 and Rs1 million.
However, he continues, increasing public awareness of scam threats is essential to averting atrocities from occurring in the first place.
The Central Bank of India downplayed scam risks as involving “insignificant” amounts or numbers of transactions, but it also stated to the FT that “adequate customer consciousness is a crucial contributory factor” that facilitates online fraud.
The focus of education work is particularly on older people or people who live in rural areas. People aged 18 to 29 are the nation’s most financially educated class, according to the most recent federal fiscal education study by the National Centre for Financial Education, which was completed in 2019. Urban responders performed better than their rural rivals.
The central bank has launched numerous “omnichannel public awareness campaigns” and provided digital finance education to people, from professors in northwestern Uttar Pradesh to the Gujarat Girls Battalion, in addition to tightening regulatory needs on banks’ payment methods. It has an annual financial literacy year, and this year’s theme was “Good economic behavior, your savior!”
ICICI Bank is one of the commercial loans that has released video advertisements, some of which feature Bollywood stars.
The online assault severely shook Maria, who only received half of her savings back and was forced to reimburse her bank for the loss on her credit cards. Maria remarked that the noise of her phone calling “was a dream.” I was terrified for the entire fortnight because I believed these con artists were calling. However, she now uses her experience to caution others, saying, “I’ve educated other people as well; I was the victim of this, but be careful.”