Govt planning to use AI for identifying mule accounts to check cybercrime: Amit Shah

New Delhi, Feb 11 (PTI) The government is planning to use Artificial Intelligence to identify ‘mule’ accounts where cyber fraudsters park swindled funds, Union Home Minister Amit Shah has said.

Chairing a meeting of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee for the Ministry of Home Affairs on the topic of ‘Cyber Security and Cyber Crime’ on Monday, Shah also said that for national security reasons, 805 apps and 3,266 website links have been blocked based on the recommendations of the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), the government’s cybercrime monitoring and detection wing.

Additionally, he said, 399 banks and financial intermediaries have come on board, over six lakh suspicious data points have been shared, more than 19 lakh mule accounts have been caught, and suspicious transactions worth Rs 2,038 crore have been prevented.

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, an official statement said.

The home minister said the government will ensure the closure of mule accounts before they even become operational.

A mule account is a bank account used by criminals to move stolen money.

He said a total of 1,43,000 FIRs have been registered on the I4C portal which has been used by more than 19 crore people.

In light of financial cyber fraud, the ‘1930’ helpline provides a one-point solution offering various services, such as blocking cards, Shah said.

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 the 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,” he said.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi, the Ministry of Home Affairs has taken several significant steps towards making India a cyber-safe nation, Shah said.

He added that cybercrime has erased all geographical boundaries and called it a ‘borderless’ and ‘formless’ crime, as it has no limits or fixed form.

India has witnessed a ‘digital revolution’ in the last decade and without understanding the size and scale of this digital revolution, “we cannot face the challenges in the cyber domain”, the home minister said.

Today, 95 per cent villages in the country are digitally connected, while one lakh gram panchayats are equipped with Wi-Fi hotspots, he said.

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 Rs 17.221 lakh crore were made through UPI.

In 2024, 48 per cent 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 Rs 32 lakh crore, which is 12 per cent, while nearly 15 million jobs were created in this period.

Shah also said that today India has become the third-largest country in the world in terms of digital landscape, and the digital economy contributes 20 per cent to the total economy of the country.

The Ministry of Home Affairs’ goal is to ensure zero cybercrime case, he said.