Over Rs 10,300 crore siphoned off by cyber criminals since 2021: I4C

The I4C is a body established by the Home Ministry to provide a framework and eco-system for law enforcement agencies for dealing with Cybercrime.

New Delhi: Indians lost around Rs 10,300 crore to cyber criminals since April 2021 while agencies managed to block transfer of around Rs 1,127 crore belonging to 4.3 lakh victims.

The country also witnessed a massive jump in people reporting about cyber fraud with the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) saying that 15.56 lakh cyber crime related complaints were logged in National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (NCRP) last year alone, a massive jump of 60.9% from 2022's 9.66 lakh. In 2021, 4.52 lakh complaints were filed.

I4C Director Rajesh Kumar on Wednesday said the overall cybercrime complaint rate in 2023 was 129 for a population of one lakh in the country with Haryana topping the list with 381 followed by Telangana 261 and Uttarakhand 243. On an average, around 50,000 cyber crime complaints are filed with the NCRP daily.

Addressing a press conference here, Kumar said, "Rs 10,319 crore has been reportedly lost in India from 1 April, 2021 to 31 December, 2023. We have managed to block Rs 1127 crore, of which 9-10 per cent has been restored in the accounts of the victims," Kumar said.

The government is finalising a new Standard Operating Procedures to make it easier for victims to claim their money lost in fraud. He said banks are demanding a court order to return the money with states like Gujarat and Karnataka leading the way where people are approaching Lok Adalats and magistrates to get their money.

On the trends of cyber crime, he said fraudsters are mainly resorting to sextortion, online booking, OLX related crimes to woo victims in regions near Delhi while gangs operating from Jharkhand are using KYC expiry and Android banking Malware-type online scams.

Highlighting the success against cyber criminals, he said they had managed to thwart cyber attack on G20 website -- 66 lakh hits a minute by bots through distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Indian agencies also managed to bring back citizens from Myanmar where they were lured on the pretext of providing jobs and held back against their will.

According to NCRP, October last year showed the highest number of reporting of online financial fraud in 2023 with 1.38 lakh people submitting their complaints followed by December when 1,32 complaints were received.

October also figured on the top on online social media related cyber crime with 14,284 complaints followed by September (13,033), July (12,870) and December (12,411).

When it comes to blocking mobile apps, the figure was 595 and it was 2,810 for website and content.

Kumar also said a new software 'Pratibimb' has been made accessible to state police forces on a project level that will enable them to locate cybercriminals operating in their area.

"The software gives the location of origin of the call, and a jurisdictional police officer takes action on that along with this information about the point of sale of SIM. Police officers in Jamtara and Deoghar are taking action on such information, which has resulted in 454 arrests last month," he added.