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

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 subsidised 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.

Such cyber scams are increasing in rural India. According to government data reported by the Indian Express newspaper, there was a 1,146% rise in reported cyber crime cases between 2021 and 2024. The government has not released this data since 2022.

But the real level of cyber crimes was likely “more rampant” than the official numbers, said Osama Manzar, the founder of Digital Empowerment Foundation, a New Delhi...

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