The quantum of financial losses incurred by the victims in cyber fraud cases has grown almost ten times in the three years up to 2024 at a whopping ₹22,845 crore, the government told Parliament today. The number of cyber fraud cases, too, have grown over five-fold in the last four years to 22.68 lakh.

Total amount of losses incurred by citizens due to cyber frauds in the entire country including Bihar from the year is ₹22,845 crore in 2024, up from ₹2,290 crore in 2022, according to a reply in Lok Sabha today by minister of state (home ministry) Bandi Sanjay Kumar.

In the reply, Kumar said the number of cases too have grown to 22.68 lakh in 2024, compared with 10.29 lakh in 2021. Kumar said financial losses have been prevented as well in number of cases due to immediate reporting by the victims.

“The Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System’ (CFCFRMS), under I4C, has been launched in year 2021 for immediate reporting of financial frauds and to stop siphoning off funds by the fraudsters,” Kumar said.  

“As per CFCFRMS operated by I4C, so far, financial amount of more than ₹7,130 Crore has been saved in more than 23.02 lakh complaints. A toll-free Helpline number ‘1930’ has been operationalized to get assistance in lodging online cyber complaints,” he added.

Kumar said steps have been taken to strengthen the mechanism to deal with cyber crimes in a comprehensive and coordinated manner including blocking of SIMs and mobile phones. “So far, more than 11.14 lakhs SIM cards and 2.96 lakhs IMEIs as reported by police authorities have been blocked by government of India.  

 “A State of the art, Cyber Fraud Mitigation Centre (CFMC) has been established at I4C where representatives of major banks, financial intermediaries, payment aggregators, telecom service providers, IT intermediaries and representatives of states/UTs law enforcement agency are working together for immediate action and seamless cooperation to tackle cybercrime,” said Kumar.

 “The government has also launched suspect registry of identifiers of cyber criminalsin collaboration with banks/financial institutions. So far, more than 18.43 lakh suspect identifier data received from banks and 24.67 lakh Layer 1 mule accounts have been shared with the participating entities of suspect registry and declined transactions worth ₹8031.56 crores,” the reply said.