Indians lost Rs 22,845.7 crore due to cyber fraud in 2024, the Union government told Parliament on Tuesday.

This was nearly 206% higher than the Rs 7,465.1 crore loss reported in 2023.

In a written reply in the Lok Sabha, Minister of State for Home Affairs Bandi Sanjay Kumar said that more than 22.6 lakh cybercrime incidents were registered on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal in 2024.

The number of such crimes increased by 42% as compared to 2023, when nearly 16 lakh incidents were reported. In 2022, around 10.3 lakh incidents of cybercrime were registered on the portal, said Kumar.

Listing the steps taken by the government to tackle cyber crimes, the minister said that the Centre has so far blocked more than 9.4 lakh SIM cards and over 2.6 lakh International Mobile Equipment Identity numbers, or IMEIs, based on police reports.

Kumar added that the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, or I4C, launched a suspect registry of identifiers of cyber criminals in September, in collaboration with banks.

The I4C monitors cyber crimes at the national level.

“So far, more than 11 lakh suspect identifier data received from banks and 24 lakh Layer 1 mule accounts have been shared with the participating entities of Suspect Registry and saved more than Rs 4,631 crores,” the minister told Lok Sabha.

A “layer 1 mule account” is created either by using stolen personal details – individuals’ Aadhaar and PAN card details – or by luring people with money into lending or renting their bank accounts for the operation.

In October, the Union home ministry said that investigation agencies in India were identifying 4,000 mule accounts every day that are used to receive and transfer funds illegally on behalf of others.

The ministry said in March that Indians had lost Rs 2,576 crore to “digital arrest scams and related cybercrimes” between 2022 and February 2025.

In cases of “digital arrest”, criminals usually orchestrate the fraud by posing as law enforcement officers, often wearing uniforms and making video calls to victims from locations made to resemble government offices or police stations. They demand money for a “compromise” and “closure of a case” against the victims.

In some cases, the victims are “digitally arrested” with the scamsters claiming that the persons are required to be visible until their demands are met.

The I4C had previously found that 46% of the cyber frauds reported between January 2024 and April 2024 originated in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.

In January, Scroll published a series of extensive reports about Chinese crime syndicates that run cyber crime centres from Southeast Asia, mainly Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. These highly sophisticated “scam compounds” are staffed with thousands of people, many of them from India, who are lured with fake job offers and then forced to work on scamming people back home.

However, those who make scam calls from such centres are victims themselves, having been lured into going abroad through fake job offers, Scroll found. When they tried to leave, they were “beaten mercilessly”.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs has warned citizens against fake job offers in Cambodia and Laos, and urged them to seek employment only through authorised agents approved by the government.

Read Scroll’s reportage of the cyber-scam centres: