UPI frauds peak in FY24, present indicators of decline: Parliament information

India’s fast-growing UPI ecosystem seems to have handed the worst of its fraud surge, based on information tabled in Parliament.

Home UPI cost frauds peaked within the monetary 12 months ended March 2024, each by way of quantity and worth, earlier than declining within the following 12 months and displaying additional moderation up to now within the present fiscal, provisional authorities information exhibits.

In FY24, India recorded 13.42 lakh UPI fraud incidents involving Rs 1,087 crore, the best stage because the real-time funds system turned mainstream. That represented almost a five-fold leap in worth from FY22, and almost double the variety of circumstances reported only a 12 months earlier.

The numbers since then recommend a pullback.

In FY25, reported incidents fell to 12.64 lakh, whereas the whole quantity concerned declined to Rs 981 crore. For the continued FY26, information obtainable until November exhibits 10.64 lakh incidents amounting to Rs 805 crore, indicating that whereas fraud stays elevated, the expansion curve has flattened and begun to show.

On grievance redressal, the federal government instructed Parliament that 22% of reported fraud circumstances had been acted upon inside seven days and 92% inside 30 days throughout April–September 2025, both by restoration or rejection. Nonetheless, solely about 6% of fraud chargebacks had been efficiently recovered, underlining the bounds of post-facto cures as soon as funds have been siphoned off.

The figures had been disclosed by Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary in response to a query on the rise in cybercrime and UPI-linked frauds. The federal government acknowledged that fraud circumstances rose alongside the speedy enlargement of digital funds, however pointed to a sequence of regulatory and technical interventions aimed toward containing the injury.

Regulators and the funds ecosystem have since moved to tighten controls. The Reserve Financial institution of India proposed organising a digital funds intelligence platform in FY25 to allow real-time, network-level sharing of suspicious transaction information throughout banks and fintechs. A committee has been fashioned to outline what information entities will share and the way fraud alerts will probably be routed into the central fraud reporting system.

NPCI, which operates UPI, has rolled out a number of guidelines and know-how adjustments over the previous two years. These embrace stricter machine binding, obligatory two-factor authentication by way of UPI PINs, each day transaction caps, and tighter limits on particular use circumstances liable to abuse. NPCI additionally runs AI and machine-learning-based real-time monitoring programs that flag irregular transaction patterns and permit banks to dam or decline suspicious transfers.

Extra just lately, NPCI tightened UPI API utilization to curb each fraud and system abuse. Excessive-frequency APIs resembling steadiness enquiries, account checklist retrieval and transaction standing checks at the moment are capped, with enforced cooldown durations between repeated requests. A compulsory show of the recipient’s registered identify and transaction ID earlier than authorisation has additionally been launched to scale back spoofed and misdirected funds.