The surge coincides with the annual rise in travel and shopping during Hindu festivals like Navratri, which cybercriminals use as a period of heightened financial activity and distraction
Cyber criminals in India are deploying sophisticated, AI-generated tools to create highly personalised and contextualised fraud attempts, leading to a nearly 40 per cent spike in attacks during the festive season, according to cybersecurity firms.
The use of Generative AI is making it “extremely easy for fraudsters to create communication that’s customised and very contextual in nature,” said Sneha Katkar, head of product strategy at Quick Heal Technologies. Up to 15 per cent of these attacks are now behaviour-based, indicating advanced targeting.
The surge coincides with the annual rise in travel and shopping during Hindu festivals like Navratri, which cybercriminals use as a period of heightened financial activity and distraction.
The Human Element of AI Fraud
The increasingly personal nature of the scams was highlighted by the case of Divya, a Mumbai content writer, who was defrauded just before her Navratri break.
Divya received a WhatsApp message from an unknown number displaying her roommate’s picture. The scammer asked her to urgently pay ₹6,000 for a food processor intended for her roommate’s mother, claiming their Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was temporarily non-functional.
Divya made the payment, believing the request was genuine because her roommate had indeed been shopping for food processors two days earlier. She later discovered she had been scammed.
While it remains unclear how the scammer was aware of Divya’s private search history, security experts warn that access to AI and machine learning tools makes it easy to generate phishing links and messages that precisely match a victim’s recent search or shopping patterns, lending the scam a crucial layer of authenticity.
