Short read: ‘There’s a scam in everything’: Cyber frauds in guise of welfare schemes target rural Indians

For the last several years, all of us had become accustomed to becoming scammed online and through phonecalls and via email. In our world view, we – the affluent city folk – were being targeted because the scammers wanted to empty our wallets. However, such is the pervasiveness of cyberfraud now that even low-income rural Indians are being scammed with the scammers finding clever ways to suck out the social security benefit payments that the rural poor receive via their bank accounts. Kunal Purohit, the author of this piece, gives us several examples of how such cyberfraud is perpetrated:

“A man posing as a government official arrived in Fatima Bi’s village in northeast India three years ago and told her she was eligible for a subsidized cooking cylinder, but since she could not sign, he said she had to apply using her thumbprint.

Bi is one of millions of Indians who access their bank accounts with biometric data, but did not suspect when the man asked her to press her thumb onto a device. The man had already entered Bi’s bank details into the system and used her thumbprint to clean out her account.

“Each time I pressed, he said the machine wasn’t detecting it,” recalled Bi, who asked for her name to be changed.

She ended up pressing her thumb eight times. After he left, she checked her phone and saw her account had been drained of some Rs 24,000 ($275) in eight transactions.”

Cybercrime in India rose 11x between 2021-24. After that the Government stopped reporting data on this subject. Government data for 2024 shows that Indians lost $2.5 billion to cyberfraud.

Increasingly however the softest targets for cyberfraud are the 488 million mobile phone users in rural India. And whilst the amounts stolen might appear small to you and me, for rural Indians these sums are their entire lifetime’s savings.

“Kerala-based private cyber crime investigator Dhanya Menon said scams often targeted villagers applying for government schemes….In contrast to urban Indians “who fall for financial frauds in trying to grow their investments”, Menon said, “rural Indians become vulnerable to them when they find themselves in a crisis, like when there is a crop failure, or when there is a medical emergency at home, or when there is shortage of food.”

But access to government welfare schemes offering relief from such crises are often the lure scammers use. Menon said scammers were often armed with information gained from government databases and private banks.

“These scammers often know when a victim has applied for welfare benefits as well as things like a loan from a private bank,” she said. “They use this information to gain trust from victims and eventually con them.””

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