COMPLAINTS OF ONLINE FRAUD ON 1930 HELPLINE IN APRIL 2023 ALONE
AMOUNT INVOLVED IN DEBIT AND CREDIT CARD FRAUD IN 2022-23, PER AN RBI REPORT
CYBERCRIME CASES PENDING INVESTIGATION AT THE END OF 2021, PER NCRB DATA
5.2 MILLION
MOBILE CONNECTIONS USING FAKE DOCUMENTS CULLED BETWEEN APRIL AND AUGUST 2023
INDIA’S SHARE IN GLOBAL DIGITAL PAYMENT USAGE, ACCORDING TO THE GOVERNMENT
Vishal Singh, a 53-year-old working for cloud communications company Sinch in Gurugram, was in an office meeting when he got a missed call from his boss on Whatsapp. He did wonder why he was using a different number, but since the profile picture was his boss’s, he ignored his misgivings. His boss said he needed a favour but couldn’t talk as he was in the middle of a customer negotiation. Claiming that he was in urgent need of cash, he asked Singh to send across some Google gift coupons in Rs 5,000 denomination. Since Singh didn’t have Google Pay, Singh told his boss his inability to do what he asked. His boss then asked him to pay 10 coupons of Rs 5,000 each from Paytm. He sent him a QR code, and Singh sent the money. Then, his boss asked him for another Rs 50,000. Singh obliged. It was when he asked for another Rs 1 lakh that Singh called his boss’s secretary to find out what was up. The secretary asked him to stop immediately as the boss was on leave in Chandigarh. When Singh called him up, his boss confirmed the same. Singh immediately rushed to the nearest cybercrime police station to register a complaint.
Singh was the victim of one of the many kinds of online frauds that have become rampant in the country. The surge in numbers is explosive. At the 1930 helpline run by the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, there were 700,000 complaints of online fraud in April 2023 alone, nearly 100,000 of them from just Uttar Pradesh (see ). That is 23,000 crimes a day and nearly 1,000 crimes an hour. Online financial fraud accounted for 77.4 per cent of the cybercrimes from January 2020 to June 2023, according to a survey by the Future Crime Research Foundation (FCRF), an IIT Kanpur-incubated nonprofit. In a report on credit and debit card frauds, the Reserve Bank of India said the amount involved was Rs 276 crore in 2022-23, up from Rs 119 crore in 2020-21 and Rs 155 crore in 2021-22. And that could well be on the conservative side. In reply to a question by MLC M. Nagaraju on February 20, 2023, the Karnataka home minister said the
