The cybercrime crisis in India is fast escalating. The financial frauds are bleeding the country of tens of thousands of crores each year. According to a report by DataLEADS, Indians lost Rs 22,842 crore to online fraudsters in 2024. The following figures will shock you more — the 2024 figures are nearly three times higher than the Rs 7,465 crore lost in 2023 and almost ten times greater than the Rs 2,306 crore in 2022. The grim outlook only worsens when measured against this year’s projections. The Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) has predicted that the cybercrime losses could soar beyond Rs 1.2 lakh crore in 2025 if current trends persist.
Story told through numbers
Nearly 20 lakh cybercrime complaints were filed in 2024, a sharp rise from 15.6 lakh in 2023 and a tenfold increase compared to 2019. The report, titled ‘Contours of Cybercrime: Persistent and Emerging Risk of Online Financial Frauds and Deepfakes in India’, stated that India’s digital crooks are not only multiplying but also deploying increasingly sophisticated methods to exploit vulnerabilities.
These upsetting trends point to a more distressing pattern that India’s digital crooks are evolving their scamming methods over time with help from tools like artificial intelligence, which remain easily available. The study authored by DataLeads further points out that with a staggering number of nearly 2.9 crore unemployed people, the number of cybercriminals in India is also expected to rise.
Researchers explain the reason behind the jump
Experts speculate that the rapid increase in the use of digital payment modes through smartphone-enabled services like Paytm and PhonePe, combined with the reckless sharing of financial details online via messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram to be one of the few factors that have contributed to this equation.
Federal data says there were over 1.9 crore UPI, or unified payment interface, transactions in June 2025 alone and these were worth a combined Rs 24.03 lakh crore.
The rampant rise in adoption of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) took place around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The government pushed for a switch to UPI apps like Paytm to ensure social distancing and minimise contact with currency notes to promote public safety.
This also meant people in small towns and villages were more likely to access financial services on their phones, as that was more cost-efficient than setting up physical banks, leading to a larger share of the Indian population adopting these fintech systems without having much awareness about the risks of cyber crimes.
Sector-wide scams
Reports further indicate that scamsters targeted multiple sectors, ranging from banking to insurance and healthcare to retail. The scamsters further curated multilayered traps using AI forged replicas of popular companies and celebrities to successfully lure people in whilst avoiding any detection.
The Reserve Bank of India reported a near eightfold jump in the amount of money lost via bank fraud between the first 6 months of 2025 to the same period last year. As the amount of money lost went from Rs 2,623 crore to Rs 21,367 crore.
Although private sector banks accounted for almost 60% of all incidents, customers of public sector banks suffered the most significant losses, totalling Rs 25,667 crore.