Government rubbishes INC’s digital fraud allegations, calls them ‘deliberate misinformation’: Official sources

The central government has dismissed a recent post by the Indian National Congress on social media containing claims regarding digital banking frauds, sources told Zee Business. Terming the post as “misleading”, “factually incorrect” and “intended to create panic”, the sources said that it was a clear attempt by the INC to stoke public fear through data distortion. On June 1, the Congress party took to microblogging site X (formerly Twitter) to allege that the Centre has failed to protect citizens from rising digital payment frauds, claiming that Indians have lost Rs 6.36 lakh crore due to digital banking scams. Strongly rejecting and condemning the INC’s claims, government sources said that the claims are based on conflated and misrepresented figures.

The INC is indulging in misrepresentation of facts by conflating specific digital payment frauds with the much broader category of total banking frauds, said the official sources. 

It is deliberately inflating figures to mislead citizens and provoke fear, with their claim of “lakhs of crores” lost specifically to digital fraud being “factually incorrect” and “deliberately distorted”, they added. 

“Congress is deliberately inflating figures by including all categories of banking fraud and mislabeling them as digital fraud,” said a senior government official. “Digital payment frauds, commonly referred to as ‘Card/Internet’ frauds, form only a subset of overall bank frauds and are treated with stringent scrutiny by the RBI, hte NPCI, and enforcement agencies,” noted the official. 

Citing data sourced from the RBI and the Ministry of Finance, the official stated that digital frauds account for only a fraction of the total banking frauds. Between FY15 and December 2024, fraud cases in the country, specifically under the “Card/Internet and Digital Payments” category, involving amounts to the tune of Rs 1 lakh, stood at 63,315 with a cumulative loss of Rs 733.3 crore.

“The figure of Rs 6.36 lakh crore quoted by Congress relates to overall banking frauds across all categories—loans, forex, deposits, and more. Presenting this as digital fraud is either a grave oversight or deliberate misinformation,” said a senior official.

The official sources also highlighted a series of steps undertaken over the past few years to fight fraud in the country’s rapidly evolving digital payments ecosystem, including:

• Digital Payment Security Controls (Feb 2021): An RBI-mandated baseline security framework for digital platforms
• ‘MuleHunter’ AI Tool: This effective tool detects suspicious money mule accounts across financial systems 
• RBI Fraud Registry: This database enables real-time detection of repeat offenders 

As a result of these efforts, the amount of fraud involving PSU banks has come down from Rs 21,626 crore in FY20 to Rs 232 crore in FY25 (till December 2024). The official also said: “We’re in the electronic era, where vigilance must be round the clock. While agencies continue to innovate with AI-based systems, public awareness remains key to containing cyber fraud, especially among elderly and first-time users.”

The Congress post overlooks the granular nature of RBI fraud categorisation and misleads by equating all fraud losses with digital scams, according to the officials, who added that the rebuttal suggests a strategic attempt to politicise a complex financial issue during an era of heightened fintech expansion. According to them, the RBI and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) continue to work closely with commercial lenders to ensure real-time fraud tracking, mandatory customer alerts and instant blocking of suspicious transactions.

In a digital-first economy, the government maintains that creating panic through distorted figures does little to help consumers and only undermines efforts to build a secure, inclusive financial infrastructure.

Here are a few things pointed out by the officials, rubbishing the INC’s claims:  

• The claim that people have lost Rs 6.36 lakh crore due to digital fraud is misleading; factual data from official sources tells a very different story