Maharashtra has by far the highest number of digital payment frauds in India, and the RBI is running awareness campaigns towards consumer protection against such frauds, according to the government in Parliament on December 6. The government was responding to two questions in the Lok Sabha asking whether it has data on the scale of digital payment frauds in India and about the efforts being undertaken to curb them. As digital payments grow aggressively in India, the number of frauds is also increasing steadily, with the RBI receiving more and more complaints about digital fraud. Timely regulatory action at this stage could be crucial to protecting vulnerable Indians from getting defrauded. What is the scale of digital payment fraud in India? In response to a question on cyber financial frauds, the Ministry of Finance released state and bank-wise fraud data obtained by the RBI: Which state has the highest fraud rates? In terms of both the number of frauds and the amount involved in such frauds, Maharashtra exceeds all other states by a significant margin. The country has seen 26, 522 cases of fraud in the last financial year, involving a total amount of 67 crores. The next highest number was in Delhi, with a total of 7,774 reported cases. Other states with high numbers of reported fraud include Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. Which banks have reported the most fraud? In the past few years, Kotak Mahindra Bank has reported a remarkably high number of digital payment frauds,…
