By Ashwin Manikandan and Surbhi Misra
April 9 (Reuters) – India’s central bank is planning to introduce delays in high-value digital transactions and extra checks for payments made by senior citizens as part of broader measures to curb a surge in online fraud, a discussion paper released on Thursday showed.
The suggestions come as digital payment fraud has risen sharply in India, driven by fake call centres, mule bank accounts – used by fraudsters to receive and transfer stolen money – and sophisticated scams such as deepfake impersonation.
The Reserve Bank of India has proposed a one‑hour lag on account-to-account transfers above 10,000 rupees ($107.92) through fast payment networks, including the Unified Payments Interface, to give customers time to cancel transactions.
These lags would not apply to merchant payments, which already have dispute-resolution mechanisms, the central bank said in the paper.
The RBI suggested a mechanism involving a provisional debit from the customer’s account during the lag period, with an alert if the transactions appear suspicious. Low-value transactions would remain instantaneous to avoid disrupting routine payments, the RBI said.
The number of reported digital payment frauds rose more than 10-fold, to 2.8 million, between 2021 and 2025, while the value of losses jumped nearly 40 times to 230 billion rupees ($2.49 billion) in this period, data from the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal showed.
EXTRA CHECKS FOR PAYMENTS BY THE ELDERLY
The central bank is also mulling extra protections for elderly and vulnerable customers, who are prime targets for scammers. If implemented, customers aged 70 and above as well as people with disabilities may need the approval of a “trusted person” for transactions higher than 50,000 rupees.
The RBI will likely allow customers to opt out of the safety system.
“Citizens above a certain age or differently-abled persons (persons with disabilities) may be particularly vulnerable to social engineering-based frauds. These targeted incidents frequently result in disproportionately higher financial losses,” the RBI said.
Other measures include imposing annual limits on certain bank accounts pending additional checks and introducing “kill switches” allowing users to instantly disable all digital payments.
The RBI has invited public feedback on the discussion paper by May 8 and said it will consider drafting formal guidelines after reviewing the responses.
($1 = 92.4400 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Reporting by Ashwin Manikandan in Mumbai and Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)
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