Indians lost more than Rs 60 lakh per hour between Jan-April to cybercrime

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Cybercriminals are continuing their plunder preying upon Indians with their guile and fraud that are taking newer and newer forms. Indians have lost more than Rs 1,750 crore – or Rs 60.76 lakh per hour – to such criminals lurking on the web and over the phone in the first four months of this year.

The Economic Times has reported quoting National Cybercrime Reporting Portal data between January to April 2024.

The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) has stated that about 7,000 cybercrime complaints were registered per day in May 2024, which is a leap of 113.7% between 2021-2023. Compared with data from 2022-23, the rise stands at 60.9%. As many as 85% of the complaints were online financial frauds.

The ministry of home affairs has set up The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre with the specific objective of providing law enforcement agencies the much-needed coordination to tackle cybercrime. That online fraud has cast its net across the country is evident from the number of rising complaints – 26,049 in 2019, 2,57,777 in 2020, 4,52,414 in 2021, 9,66,790 in 2022, 15,56,218 in 2023 and 7,40,957 in 2024 in the first four months of this year alone.

Digital arrest is the latest tactic employed by fraudsters who, to gain credibility, engage the victims in live audio or video calls till they make the payment. In these cases, the fraudsters almost always impersonate police, CID, CBI, ED or narcotics department officials and threaten unsuspecting citizens. AI-generated voice or video calls are also employed to prey upon common persons.

Usually, victims are targeted with online investment fraud, gaming apps, algorithm manipulations, illegal lending apps, sextortion, and OTP forwards among others.

Over 1 lakh investment scam cases were reported in 2023, according to I4C. Indians lost Rs 120 crore in 4,599 cases between January and April of 2024.

Trading scams accounted for 20,043 complaints of which Rs 1,420 crore were lost to cyber criminals in the same period.

Investment scams resulted in a loss of Rs 222 crore (62,687 complaints) while Rs 13.23 crore were looted through dating apps (1,725 complaints).

In order to tackle the menace I4C is working with RBI, DFS, banks, FIU, DoT, DIU, fintech companies on the use of mule accounts and abuse of telecom infrastructure by cybercriminals.

Desperate to tackle cyber criminals, the government has directed telecom companies to reverify KYC close to 6.8 lakh SIMs that could have been misused for suspicious activities. The DoT suspects these SIMs were obtained using fake, invalid identities for ulterior motives.