CHENNAI: Victims of financial cybercrime in India include IT professionals, bankers, doctors, management and finance professionals, public-sector officers, and people with cybersecurity qualifications, a study by IIT-Madras researchers has found.
The findings challenge the perception that victims are necessarily careless, digitally inexperienced or driven by greed.
While data from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) capture financial losses, they don’t reveal much about human trauma. The study, led by P Kandaswamy and Nandan Sudarsanam in collaboration with Akanksha Jaiswal and Ameeta Fernando, was based on semi-structured interviews with 33 victims from Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, New Delhi, and Mumbai.
The sample set included 12 senior citizens. It was published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a peer-reviewed Springer Nature journal.
The researchers identified four prominent vulnerabilities including anticipated gain, fear, lack of awareness and threats to self-worth. These were exploited through investment and stock-trading frauds, task and job scams, digital-payment fraud, malware attacks and digital arrest scams. The study highlights India-specific tactics involving Aadhaar and UPI transfers, among others.