Have you ever been scammed while making an online payment? Most people can relate to it today, when transactions happen in seconds—a link clicked in a hurry, a call that sounded routine, a message that looked real enough.
While reporting this story , I realised that these incidents don’t just lead to financial loss. They leave people shaken and unsure of what to trust.
I also realised that the fraud itself is not always the worst part. What comes after is. Most people today know how digital fraud works and how dangerous it can be. What they don’t know is what really happens after the scam.
For this story, I spoke to victims of digital fraud to understand what challenges they faced after the initial shock of being scammed. What they revealed is not just uncomfortable, but leaves you with a deep sense of insecurity.
Stay with me as I take you through what they experienced after being scammed.
First, I spoke to Mumbai-based Pratima Singh, the sister of an industry colleague, over a phone call. She told me that it began like any other weekday morning around seven months ago.
At around 8:30 am, she saw a message that appeared to be from ICICI Bank. It mentioned a voucher. There was a link. Nothing about it seemed unusual enough to stop and question.
“I was in a hurry. I didn’t check properly,” she said. She clicked on it and moved on.
Then the messages began. Transaction alerts—but not in rupees. Indonesian rupiah. One transaction went through, then another. Three were successful. A fourth was attempted. In total, multiple attempts were made before she fully understood what was happening.
By then, she had already lost Rs 10,000.
When she retraced the moment, it came down to a single step. “It asked for the OTP and the number, and I gave it,” she said.
But what stayed with her was not just that moment. It was everything that followed. She filed a complaint, went to the police station, registered an FIR, and contacted the bank.
“I did everything. I waited for things to resolve.”
But nothing happened. The money never came back.
“Even the bank didn’t help me,” she said, with an air of disappointment in her voice.
And this is not a one-off incident. In most cases of digital fraud, banks and financial institutions are quick to blame the already embarrassed victim, saying you shared the OTP.
But experts I spoke to for an earlier story specifically mentioned how an entire ecosystem , and how difficult it is for ordinary people to identify these traps. So it is baffling that customers are often blamed after they have already been defrauded.
The usual response is: “You shared the OTP. You shared the PIN. You did it.”
Sure. But how is a person supposed to understand this in real time? What safeguards can banks actually bring?
The next person I spoke to told a story that exposes how, in most cases, victims of digital fraud are left helpless.
That account came from 28-year-old Kavya Sharma, based in Delhi. Her story is even more baffling. She did not click on any suspicious link. It all began with a phone call during office hours.
“I got a call from an unknown number saying she wanted to return Rs 5,000 to my father. I assumed it was a long-pending security amount. When I asked her to confirm, she said yes,” Kavya told me.
Then the person asked Kavya if she had Google Pay linked to her number. When she said yes, the woman said she would transfer Rs 5,000 to her.
What happened next is something that would catch most people off guard.
Kavya told me that she received a message saying Rs 50,000 had been credited to her bank account. She described the message as exactly like the ones banks send.
Then the caller told her that she had mistakenly transferred Rs 50,000 instead of Rs 5,000.
Little did Kavya know that she was moments away from losing Rs 45,000.
“I trusted her and didn’t check the source of that credited amount message. I transferred her Rs 45,000 and informed her,” Kavya told me.
Once she had made that transaction, the caller asked her to transfer Rs 70,000 more, saying her son was unable to transfer the money and asking Kavya to help.
Kavya grew suspicious and told a colleague, who immediately said it was a scam.
“Rs 45,000 vanished from my account in seconds. I lodged an FIR, but there was no action. Police froze Rs 20,000 from that GPay-linked account, but I have never received any update from the police, nor have I received the remaining amount,” she said.
A similar incident happened to a 33-year-old Noida-based media professional, who did not wish to be named for this story. She had listed an almirah on OLX, an online marketplace for buying and selling second-hand goods.
“I wanted to sell an almirah and had listed it on OLX. A man contacted me, agreed to the quoted price of Rs 6,000 without any bargaining, which, in hindsight, was the first red flag, and said he wanted to buy it,” she told me.
He tricked her into transferring Rs 30,000 through a chain of transactions after initially claiming he had an issue with his Paytm account.
In that moment, she froze, not fully understanding what had just happened. And that is what happens to most people who get scammed. In many cases, it is already too late by the time they realise.
She immediately contacted her bank after losing Rs 30,000. Her bank advised her to file a complaint with the cyber cell.
“I contacted my bank, but they advised me to file a complaint with the cyber cell. I did file a complaint, but unfortunately, nothing came of it,” she said.
What surprised me during the course of reporting this story is that almost all digital fraud victims said banks offered them no real help.
In an age of AI and increasingly sophisticated fraud, leaving customers to navigate this on their own creates a serious gap.
Hunny Yadav, 30, a Delhi-based communication consultant, told me how a particularly alarming incident happened to him on Diwali a couple of years ago.
It was a busy day. He was helping his father, who runs a small distributor business. Diwali is one of the biggest festivals in North India, and the footfall was high.
He had just gone home to rest when his phone started buzzing.
“Ting, ting, ting—one notification after another. I thought they were usual Diwali wishes,” he told me.
Then he checked.
Repeated debits of Rs 1,034 were being made from his account.
“I had not clicked anything. I had not shared any OTP,” he said.
He immediately woke up, ran to his laptop, changed his internet banking password, and froze his debit card.
“But by then, 11 transactions had happened, amounting to around Rs 11,374,” he said.
He contacted the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal. He was asked the usual questions—did you click a link, did you share an OTP. He hadn’t, so he denied it.
He was told to go to the police station and submit a written complaint, and also inform his bank. Hunny did that without delay, but told me that the same questions were asked again.
“The questions from the bank were more like putting the blame on me, that I definitely would have given the OTP without knowing or had clicked on the link,” he said.
When he denied it, the bank said they would investigate and update him.
There was no update.
What he did receive, about 30 days later, was a credit message for the exact amount deducted.
“This also assured my parents that I was not at fault,” he told me.
He was one of the luckier ones. Data presented by the Ministry of Home Affairs in Parliament shows how rare such outcomes are. In Delhi alone, between 2023 and 2025, victims lost around Rs 1,716.6 crore to digital payment fraud and online cheating. Of this, only Rs 174.8 crore, or about 10%, has been recovered so far.
Coming back to Hunny’s story, the fact that he got no updates and was still blamed for something he hadn’t done shows a larger problem. In many digital fraud cases, the default assumption is that the person must have made a mistake.
In more advanced cases, people can lose money without clicking a link or sharing an OTP. It can happen during a normal transaction. This is why the government has asked banks to .
Hunny also told me that he continues to receive calls from unknown numbers where callers pretend to know his father.
“They speak very casually, like, ‘Hunny beta, aapke papa ne aapka number diya hai, ek payment karni hai, aapke number par karne ko bola hai’ (Hunny, your father gave me your number, I need to make a payment and he asked me to send it to you),” he said.
When he agrees, the caller asks him to open his UPI app and check if he has received a small amount, usually Rs 10.
“I only see a message inside the app. There is no actual credit,” he said.
The instructions then become more specific.
“They say that because it’s a merchant account, I have to ‘receive’ the payment first, and then they send a request and guide me step by step—basically telling me what to do until I enter my PIN,” he said. “I definitely did not do that.”
This is something that happens with many people today. In a way, this has become one of the most common digital payment scams.
Niharika, 33, a writer based in the NCR, also shared how a digital scam devastated her. Her experience shows how fraud can surface anywhere—during a simple online purchase or through what looks like a legitimate listing.
“So it was partly my fault because I looked up for liquor online in Gurugram. However, in my defence, it was properly listed on Google with ratings. Clearly this is an inter-platform problem, nobody on Google can verify whether that business actually exists,” she said.
At the time, she was going through a difficult phase and was alone at home ahead of Diwali. “My mental health was absolutely in shambles, but that was me using online services to somehow participate in life,” she said. “I just wanted to buy liquor for a friend’s Diwali party.”
She called the number listed online and placed an order.
“They told me to make a payment of Rs 9,000, which I did via UPI. Then they asked me to make one more payment of Rs 9,000 for the bill, which they said they would return right away.”
She complied. But the interaction did not end there.
“I was alone in the house at that point. Nobody to check or oversee my purchase,” she said.
The calls continued, and their explanations kept changing. “They kept saying my payments were either not reaching them or were inconsistent with the billing they had to generate, and they withheld the alcohol also,” she said.
At that point, her focus shifted to just getting back the money she had already transferred. “I was trying to recover my money.”
That kept her engaged for nearly two hours. “I was kind of under that digital robbery for about two hours, trying to revive my original loss,” she said.
By the time she realised and stopped, around Rs 80,000 had been transferred.
“I was crying, screaming, and shattered because it was almost a month’s income,” she said. “But some voice inside me finally got in control and said, enough, I am not going to send you any more money.”
If the fraud itself was traumatic, what followed made it worse.
“I remember the officer asking me what alcohol I had ordered. He was very amused that a woman was buying liquor, so you can imagine the sexism in that reporting process too,” she said.
The money was never recovered.
“This happened three days before Diwali 2024. That man switched off his number. I was devastated, and in trauma for a few weeks,” she said.
“Even the sound of a UPI notification scared me.”
These stories do not fit into a single category. Today, digital scams take many forms, from links and calls to listings and unexplained debits. They also strike at different moments, during work, festivals, or simple lapses in attention.
But the outcome is often the same.
The fraud itself is not the whole story. What happens after is where the real impact lies.
Digital fraud in India is not just increasing. It is also changing. It is becoming more targeted, more complex, and in some cases, more psychological. With artificial intelligence entering the picture, fraudsters could come up with even more convincing methods.
This growing complexity has started to draw attention at the highest levels. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman after a high-level meeting with bank chiefs. The Supreme Court has also raised concerns about how banks handle such cases.
But even in simpler cases, a pattern appears once the money is gone. The system slows down. Complaints are filed. FIRs are registered. Banks are informed. And then people wait.
During this process, the focus often shifts. Did you click a link? Did you share an OTP? Did you approve the transaction?
The answers to these questions often decide what happens next—whether the case is treated as fraud or as user error.
India’s digital payments system has made transactions fast and easy. But when something goes wrong, the response does not move at the same speed.
For Pratima, Kavya, Hunny and Niharika, that gap is where the real problem lies. Not just in how the fraud happens, but in how hard it is to recover from it.
(Stay tuned for part three of our series on Banking Risks in Digital India, where I speak to banks and financial institutions about how they are preparing for advanced fraud and preventing such incidents.)