Scam alert: Google flags 4.1 crore transactions on GPay, blocks 60 million risky app installs

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Google on June 17 said it put out more than 4.1 crore warnings to Indian users on its UPI app, Google Pay, against suspected transactions using AI-powered fraud detection systems built into the platform.

As digital payments pick up, there are growing concerns about scams involving payments apps. UPI frauds alone cost Indians over Rs 1,087 crore in 2024. The number of incidents rose from 7.25 lakh in FY23 to 13.42 lakh in FY24, data shared by finance ministry shows.

The tech giant also said its Play Protect pilot, launched in October, has blocked nearly 60 million attempts to install high-risk apps on Android devices across the country. These apps, which could have infected devices or stolen data, were stopped in 13 million devices and involved over 2.2 lakh unique apps flagged before causing any harm.

The data shared by Google was part of its “Safety Charter for India” unveiled on June 17 to outline how the tech giant is using artificial intelligence (AI) to secure the country’s fast-growing digital economy.

"India's digital journey continues to unlock incredible opportunities, but we also see the rise of sophisticated online threats evolving at machine speed," said Heather Adkins, vice president of engineering, Google Security. "Our safety charter represents a comprehensive blueprint where AI isn't just narrowing the gap between attackers and defenders — it's eliminating it in some cases."

Indian entities are expected to lose Rs 20,000 crore to cybercrimes in 2025, if unchecked, a report by cybersecurity intelligence firm CloudSEK has said.

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“Scam resilience is a combination of on-product protections and user awareness,” Google said, adding threats in India are evolving fast, with scammers increasingly using AI-generated content, deepfake videos, and voice cloning.

Collaboration with IIT-Madras

In cybersecurity R&D, Google announced a collaboration with IIT-Madras to advance Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), aiming to build smarter privacy protections and secure digital interactions for the future.

Google and IIT-M partnered in 2022, when the US technology giant joined as a “platinum consortium” member of the institute's Centre for Responsible Artificial Intelligence (CeRAI), marking its commitment with an initial investment of $1 million.

Last year, to improve Indic LLM capabilities, the company expanded its Gemini AI language testing to 29 Indian languages and developed a benchmark called IndicGenBench to evaluate AI safety and accuracy in the Indian context. The benchmark helps evaluate the generative capabilities of Indic LLMs.

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DigiKavach

Beyond financial safety measures, Google in February partnered with home ministry’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) to expand its anti-scam initiative DigiKavach in a phased rollout over the next few months.

The company’s AI safeguards are also being built into core products. For instance, Google Messages now blocks over 500 million scam texts a month in India, and more than 2.5 billion warnings have been issued for unsafe links, processed entirely on-device to ensure privacy.

To strengthen threat detection, Google is deploying AI-assisted red teaming, where AI models simulate attacks against each other to identify vulnerabilities, alongside rigorous adversarial testing. These tools are part of its broader effort to embed responsible AI principles directly into enterprise and government digitization projects in India, the company said.

“Google’s surfaces and platforms are just one component of a vast digital ecosystem… Safety is a shared responsibility,” the company said, noting that it is working with the Department of Telecom, SEBI, and various government agencies to tackle rising online threats.