Nearly 400k SIMs axed for fraud

Time of India

2 hours ago

The telecom department's Financial Risk Indicator (FRI) has blacklisted 300,000-400,000 SIMs used in fraudulent schemes. This initiative flags 2,000 high-risk numbers daily, aiding UPI platforms in preventing crores worth of suspicious transactions. Banks are integrating FRI to reduce fraud response times, with institutions like PhonePe and HDFC Bank actively using the platform to prevent fraud.
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Mumbai: The telecom department's latest initiative to categorise high-risk fraud accounts has caught and blacklisted 300,000-400,000 telecom SIMs used in fraudulent schemes, show government data.The Financial Risk Indicator (FRI), launched in May, is now daily flagging 2,000 high-risk phone numbers that may be involved in investment or job scams, and other fraudulent activities. More SIMs on the network are then identified using artificial intelligence-based pattern matching. This has helped UPI platforms like Paytm , GPay and PhonePe prevent suspicious transactions worth crores of rupees in the past month, a senior official at the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) told ET.In July, banking regulator Reserve Bank of India issued an advisory to all commercial banks, co-operative banks and payments banks to integrate the FRI with their system."As a result, time-to-action on fraud accounts has been reduced to a few hours," the DoT official said. "This also signals increasing maturity of DoT's Digital Intelligence Platform which was launched with the aim of real-time data exchange among stakeholders."Banks and financial institutions are using the FRI to take preventive measures, such as declining suspicious transactions, issuing alerts or warnings to customers, and delaying transactions flagged as high risk.The system's utility has already been demonstrated with leading institutions such as PhonePe, Punjab National Bank ICICI Bank , Paytm and India Post Payments Bank actively using the platform, the telecom department had said previously.As part of this initiative, digital fraud prevention platform MFilterIt has deployed AI-based honeypots on X, Instagram and Facebook which scrape social media to find and interact with such scam accounts. Nearly 125 such accounts are discovered and flagged by a single AI bot daily, the company said."These are investment scam fraudsters which may or may not be using mule accounts," said Dhiraj Gupta, cofounder and chief technology officer at MFilterIt. "We are tracking social media for these fraudsters who post tall claims like 'double your money in 6hrs' and then our bot interacts with these people posing as genuine investors. This persuades the criminals to reveal their information like UPI ID or barcode," he explained.The FRI represents a vital pre-emptive strike against fraud, said Gaurav Gupta, senior product manager at digital identity verification agency Signzy.