India’s latest declarations about building a “trusted AI ecosystem,” investing hundreds of billions into sovereign AI, and tightening deepfake regulation sound ambitious — even impressive on paper.

Grand AI Promises Mean Little Without Cybercrime Accountability

But ambition alone does not build trust. Trust is earned through outcomes, and the gap between India’s technology rhetoric and the global reality of cyber-fraud enforcement continues to raise legitimate questions.

Across the world, law-enforcement agencies, cybersecurity firms and financial institutions have repeatedly traced large volumes of impersonation scams, tech-support fraud, refund schemes and investment cons to organised criminal operations operating within or through networks linked to India.

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw’s comments about protecting society from deepfake harm, creating UPI-style AI platforms, and positioning India as a “trusted AI partner to the Global South” arrive at a time when international law-enforcement agencies and cybersecurity firms are still tracking persistent global scam operations in country that remain difficult to dismantle.

Announcing investment figures and infrastructure plans is easy; demonstrating sustained, measurable disruption of organised cybercrime networks is far harder — and far more important.

The push for “sovereign AI” and culturally trained large language models also risks sounding like a branding exercise unless accompanied by equally aggressive efforts to police the misuse of the very technologies the government is promoting.

Deepfake threats, phishing campaigns, impersonation fraud and AI-driven scams are not hypothetical future risks — they are current, daily realities affecting victims worldwide.

Regulation frameworks, summit speeches and investment pledges do little to reassure the global community if enforcement remains inconsistent or reactive.

Positioning India as a global AI hub requires more than infrastructure spending and developer platforms. It requires the country to demonstrate that it can also lead in cybercrime accountability.

Faster prosecution pipelines, deeper international cooperation, tighter telecom and digital-payment oversight, and transparent reporting is needed to show criminal networks being dismantled — not merely discussed.

Until that enforcement credibility becomes unmistakable, claims of becoming a “trusted AI ecosystem” risk being perceived less as evidence of leadership and more as aspirational messaging.

Across the world, law-enforcement agencies, cybersecurity firms and financial institutions have repeatedly traced large volumes of impersonation scams, tech-support fraud, refund schemes and investment cons to organised criminal operations operating within or through networks linked to India

Victims continue to report the same patterns: fraudulent call centres, coordinated phishing networks, and payment-laundering pipelines that remain active for long periods before meaningful disruption occurs.

When enforcement actions do happen, they are often sporadic headline raids rather than sustained, system-wide crackdowns that dismantle the networks permanently.

Australia continues to lose billions of dollars each year to online fraud, with international investigators and cybersecurity firms repeatedly tracing a significant share of scam operations to organised networks operating out of overseas call-centre and digital-fraud hubs, including India.

For victims and financial institutions, the problem is not a lack of cybercrime laws but a lack of sustained regulatory pressure, prosecutions and cross-border cooperation that would permanently disrupt the operations behind impersonation, investment and tech-support scams.

Until enforcement becomes systematic rather than episodic, announcements about tougher digital regulation risk sounding disconnected from the daily financial damage still being inflicted on consumers worldwide.

Governments seeking credibility in the fight against online fraud must demonstrate measurable results — shuttered scam centres, frozen payment channels and rising conviction rates — not simply policy promises.