The government is planning to use artificial intelligence to identify mule accounts where cyber fraudsters park swindled funds, Union home minister Amit Shah said at a meeting of a parliamentary consultative committee of the MHA.
The meeting, on cyber security and cybercrime, was held in Delhi on Monday, where the home minister also highlighted the steps taken by the Centre to deal with cybercrimes.
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“Shah said efforts are underway to use artificial intelligence (AI) for identifying mule accounts, in coordination with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and all banks to establish a system for their detection,” a statement issued by the MHA said quoting Shah.
For national security reasons, 805 apps and 3,266 websites have been blocked based on the recommendations of the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), MHA’s cybercrime monitoring and detection wing, the statement said on Tuesday.
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Additionally, 399 banks and financial intermediaries have come on board, over 600,000 suspicious data points have been shared, more than 1.9 million mule accounts have been identified, and suspicious transactions worth ₹2,038 crore have been prevented, it said.
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Shah further said that a total of 143,000 FIRs have been registered on the I4C portal which has been used by more than 190 million people.
He said the government has also ensured that people are made aware of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s mantra “Stop-Think-Take Action” to make them more vigilant against cybercrime.
“In recent years, there has been an expansion of digital infrastructure in India, which has naturally led to an increase in the number of cyber attacks,” the home minister said.
When cyberspace is looked at from a different perspective, it forms a complex network of “software”, “services” and “users”, he noted.
“Until we consider controlling cyber fraud through software, services, and users, it will be impossible to resolve the issues of cyberspace,” Shah said.
Cybercrime has erased all geographical boundaries and called it a “borderless” and “formless” crime, he said.
Asserting that India has witnessed a digital revolution in the last decade, Shah said without understanding the size and scale of this digital revolution, “we cannot face the challenges in the cyber domain”.
“Today, 95% villages in the country are digitally connected, while one lakh gram panchayats are equipped with Wi-Fi hotspots. In the past 10 years, the number of internet users has increased by 4.5 times and in 2024, a total of 246 trillion transactions worth ₹17.221 lakh crore were made through UPI. In 2024, 48% of global digital transactions took place in India, and in terms of the startup ecosystem, India has become the third-largest country in the world,” Shah said.
In 2023, he said, the contribution of the digital economy to the gross domestic product (GDP) was around ₹32 lakh crore, which is 12%, while nearly 15 million jobs were created in this period.
Shah also said that India has become the third-largest country in the world in terms of digital landscape, and the digital economy contributes 20% to the total economy of the country.
The MHA’s goal, he added, is to ensure zero cybercrime cases.
