GSMA flags scam losses, unresolved cases as India’s digital economy expands

As India’s digital economy moves from connectivity-led growth to AI and enterprise digitisation, the GSMA said on Wednesday at India Mobile Congress 2026 that it must place greater emphasis on trust, fraud prevention, and faster resolution of consumer scams.

The GSMA’s India Consumer Scam Report 2026 found that 12% of respondents had been scammed in the previous year, while 72% said the growing risk of scams had changed their behaviour. Although 86% of victims reported their cases to an organisation, 33% of reported cases remained unresolved, and 67% of victims who lost money recovered none of it.

Thirty-three per cent of reported cases end unresolved, and 67% of those who lost money recover nothing. The harm is personal as well as financial, as 43% of Indian victims name ongoing anxiety or a loss of confidence, compared with 38% across ASEAN-6; 35% the time and effort of trying to resolve the case, compared with 39%; and 29% losing enough that it still worries them today, compared with 35%. Emotional distress is the biggest impact, cited by 42%, compared with 50% across ASEAN-6 and 46% in Singapore and Indonesia, the lowest of the six ASEAN markets.

“Among Indian victims whose cases were resolved, 88% are comfortable with the government holding their data, 87% with digital platforms, 87% with their bank and 80% with their mobile operator. Among victims whose cases are unresolved, the figures are 64% for government, 57% for digital platforms, 85% for banks and 68% for mobile operators. These comparisons rest on 95 victims whose cases were resolved and 47 whose cases are unresolved,” the report stated. The GSMA has called for faster case resolution, better recovery mechanisms and closer coordination between governments, banks, mobile operators and digital platforms.

GSMA pushes AI-ready networks, digital trust

The findings come as India enters what the GSMA described as the next phase of its digital development. India has around 1.2 billion active mobile connections and nearly 450 million 5G connections, but the organisation said connectivity scale now needs to translate into greater economic value.

“India has demonstrated that it can deliver digital scale. The opportunity now is to turn that scale into innovation, enterprise growth and trusted digital services,” Vivek Badrinath, Director General of the GSMA, said at IMC. “India’s next decade will be defined not simply by how many people are connected, but by what they can achieve through that connectivity. Digital trust is not simply a safeguard. It is infrastructure for growth,” he said.

The GSMA’s India Ecosystem Insight Report identifies three priorities: AI-ready networks, enterprise digitisation and digital trust. It said networks will need to become high-capacity, secure and resilient enough to support AI workloads, while AI itself can be used for network planning, energy efficiency, cybersecurity and fraud detection.

Indian operators Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea support GSMA Open Gateway, which provides network APIs for functions including number verification and SIM-swap signals. The GSMA said such tools could provide another layer of protection against fraud.

The organisation also said India has an opportunity to influence global 6G standards, with the Bharat 6G Alliance among industry partners that have signed the GSMA’s Tokyo Accord on open, interoperable and trusted 6G ecosystems.