The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked banks and payments banks to plug into the Department of Telecommunications’ (DoT) fraud risk indicator (FRI), a tool designed to identify high-risk mobile numbers based on suspected financial fraud.
The advisory, issued on June 30, is aimed at helping financial institutions spot suspicious behaviour linked to mobile numbers and act in real time. It comes as India faces an alarming wave of online frauds, with thousands of victims falling prey each month.
The FRI, launched in May, is essentially a scoring system. It labels mobile numbers based on how likely they are to be involved in financial fraud. This score is generated from complaints on the government’s cybercrime portal, DoT’s Chakshu platform, and inputs from banks and financial firms.
Banks using this system can decline dodgy transactions, delay high-risk transfers, or shoot out alerts to customers before money vanishes. According to the DoT, big players like HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, PhonePe and Paytm are already using the tool.
DoT called RBI’s directive a “watershed moment” in India’s battle against financial fraud and a sign of the growing teamwork between tech, telecom and finance regulators.
The move is particularly relevant now, as Unified Payments Interface (UPI) continues to dominate digital transactions in India. With mobile-based payment frauds on the rise, the FRI gives banks and fintechs a way to act swiftly and precisely—before money is lost, not after.
The entire data exchange is automated through an API platform that feeds real-time insights between banks and DoT’s digital systems. The feedback loop also helps improve fraud detection with each flagged case.
On another front, the National Quantum Mission (NQM) is building a task force to prep Indian banks for a future where quantum computers could become a cybersecurity threat.
This task force is working on guidelines to help banks switch over to quantum-ready systems for cybersecurity and data analytics. A draft version is likely to be out in a few months, pending government nod.
One of the mission’s early goals is setting up a long-distance quantum key distribution (QKD) network—a secure system to share encryption keys using the laws of quantum physics. This network may go live by late July or early August.
Recent figures paint a worrying picture. India lost ₹1,935.51 crore to digital arrest scams in 2024 alone. Another ₹107.21 crore was lost in cyber frauds during the first nine months of FY25, as per data shared by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
To fight back, the government has blocked lakhs of SIM cards and mobile device identifiers (IMEIs), along with thousands of WhatsApp accounts allegedly used to run online scams.
Meanwhile, India has emerged as the second-most targeted country globally for cyber-attacks, with 95 firms hit by data theft in 2024, according to a security company CloudSEK.