Growing online financial frauds in India!

By M.Y.Siddiqui

Cyber financial frauds in India have surged dramatically with losses reaching rupees 22,845 crore in calendar year 2024, a 206 percent increase from 7,465 crore in 2023. Over 36 lakh complaints were logged, driven by investment scams, digital arrests (a new phenomenon not recognized by the government so far), and trading frauds. Projections for 2025 warn of estimated potential losses exceeding 1.2 lakh crore, representing 0.7 percent of country’s GDP. In the first half of 2025, victims lost an average of 1000 crore per month, with total projected annual losses for 2025 potentially exceeding rupees 1.2 lakh crore. Besides, 700 complaints against cyber financial frauds were recorded per day.

Top primary scams include trading scams; investment based fraudulent tasks, and digital arrests, where victims are intimidated via video calls. Over 50 percent of financial frauds originate from South East Asian countries like Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, and are often run by foreign syndicates. Modus operandi of fraudsters heavily includes phishing, fake investment apps, and social media, along with ghost SIM cards. The spike in losses highlights growing vulnerabilities in digital payments, requiring tighter real-time monitoring by banks and improved cyber-hygiene among users.

The Government of India has taken several measures to retrieve the situation. The government’s Citizen Financial Fraud Reporting and Management System (CFCFRMS) blocked or retrieved rupees 5,489 crore in 2024. Online hackings involve various methods used by malicious actors to compromise digital systems. These methods fall into common types of cyber attacks, targeting individuals, businesses, and governments. Some relevant online hacking techniques involve malware attacks, ransom ware, phishing, and social engineering manipulations, denial-of-service (DoS/DDoS) that overwhelms systems with traffic to disrupt service, Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks to intercept communication to steal or alter data.  

Other worrying signs are personal data theft of women to blackmail them for various nefarious designs, including attacking their personal dignity and individual honour, ruining their career prospects, marriages, and social reputations. This has emerged as a major phenomenon in urban areas. This crime is also spreading in rural areas with the rapid rise of digitization in the country that is bridging digital divide among the people despite increasing poverty and losses in purchasing power of the majority of people, notwithstanding the contrary official claims.

Other methods of frauds are: SQL Injection that exploits data based vulnerabilities to manipulate data, Brute Force Attacks, a combination to crack passwords, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) injecting malicious scripts into web pages, Zero-Day Exploits, targeting unknown software vulnerabilities, and DNS Spoofing that redirects users to fake websites. The government has been taking innovative protective, preventive and precautionary steps to avert cyber frauds of all kinds to secure the citizens and their businesses. Nevertheless, the hackers/fraudsters take preemptive actions most of the times to commit cyber crimes as they always try to be ahead of preventive actions. Preventing cyber attacks often involves cyber security best practices like using strong passwords, updating software, and employing antivirus programme!

Powered by Froala Editor