"Trust is the currency of digital finance, but misplaced trust is its biggest vulnerability." Discuss, with reference to recent evidence on cybercrime victimisation in India.

India's digital finance runs on trust. In FY 2025-26, UPI handled more than 24,000 crore transactions worth over ₹314 lakh crore [1]. Yet the Status of Policing in India Report (SPIR) 2026 finds that the people who trusted online banking most and used UPI most were more likely to be cybercrime victims [1]. Trust has become both the engine of digital finance and its weak point.

Trust as the currency of digital finance

• Mass adoption: 49% of SPIR respondents use UPI daily. Vendors, auto drivers and doctors all accept payment by QR code [1].
• Low-friction design: "a scan, a password, a reassuring beep" makes formal payments feel routine and cheap [1].
• Regulatory assurance: under RBI's 2017 framework, customers bear zero liability for third-party breaches reported within three working days [2].

Misplaced trust as vulnerability: recent evidence

• Trust paradox: confident, frequent users approve payments by habit and skip deliberate checks [1].
• Trust in the State turned against citizens: in "digital arrest" scams, callers pose as State Police, NCB, CBI or RBI, often using spoofed international calls that show Indian numbers [3].
• Liability gap: when a deceived victim enters the PIN themselves, banks treat it as the customer's own act or negligence. A customer who shared credentials bears the entire loss until they report it [2].
• Recovery gap: of ₹56,087 crore reported lost on NCRP (FY 2023-24 to 2025-26), only about ₹9,079 crore was placed under lien. The 53.87 lakh complaints led to only about 1.81 lakh FIRs [4].
• Caveat: SPIR shows a link, not proof of cause. Daily users may simply be targeted more often, so awareness campaigns alone cannot be the fix [1].

Way forward

• Stop fraud before payment: the Suspect Registry flagged 32.08 lakh mule accounts, and transactions worth ₹25,698 crore were declined. That is more than double the ₹11,158 crore saved after complaints [5]. The I4C–RBIH MoU applies AI to detect mule accounts [6].
• Share the liability: finalise RBI's March 2026 draft, which widens fraud coverage and adds compensation for small-value frauds [7].
• Convert complaints into cases: scale up I4C's e-Zero FIR [8].
• Targeted friction: add warnings for large payments to first-time payees, and run cyber-hygiene drives for the elderly.

Trust built UPI's success, but trust without safeguards lets fraudsters exploit it. Banks, regulators, platforms and police need to share the burden that currently falls on users. Doing so would protect citizens' right to dignity and security under Article 21 and keep India's digital public infrastructure inclusive and safe.