Google is bringing more AI resources to India’s fight against digital fraud, launching on-device fraud detection for Pixel 9 devices and new screen sharing notifications for financial apps.
Digital fraud continues to grow in India as more people come online for the first time and increasingly rely on smartphones to make payments, shop and access government services. Charged with fraud involving digital transactions over half of all reported bank fraud in 2024 — 13,516 cases resulting in losses of ₹5.2 billion (about $58.61 million), according to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Internet scams generated around ₹70 billion (about $789 million) in losses in the first five months of 2025, the Interior Ministry said. Many incidents likely go unreported, either because victims are unsure how to report or because they wish to avoid additional scrutiny.
On Thursday, Google was announced the expansion of real-time fraud detection, which uses Gemini Nano to analyze calls on the device and flag potential fraud without recording audio or sending data to Google servers. The feature is disabled by default and only applies to calls from unknown numbers and plays a beep during the conversation to alert participants. It debuted in the US in March as a beta for English-speaking Pixel 9 users.
Google confirmed to TechCrunch that the fraud detection on the device will initially only work on Pixel 9 and newer models in India and will be limited to English-speaking users, with its warning also only in English. This limits its appeal to a market where Android accounts almost 96% of smartphonesper Statcounter, but Pixel devices held less than 1%. in 2024. The language restriction is also notable in a country where most users rely primarily on non-English languages — an audience that Google and others like Amazon have recognized by adding support for Indian languages to their services in recent years.
The tech giant said it was working to bring fraud detection to non-Pixel Android phones as well, without offering a timeline.
Google also announced a pilot in India with financial apps Navi, Paytm and Google Pay aimed at curbing screen-sharing scams, in which fraudsters trick victims into sharing their screens to obtain one-time passwords, PINs and other credentials during a call. The feature was first announced at Google I/O in May and was initially tested in the UK
Users with devices running Android 11 or higher will be able to access the notifications, which include a one-tap option to end the call and stop screen sharing. Google confirmed to TechCrunch that it plans to add more app partners and the feature will also display notifications in Indian languages, but did not elaborate.
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For several months, Google has also been using its Play Protect service to curb predatory lending apps in India by blocking the sideloading of third-party apps that ask for sensitive permissions that are often exploited for fraud. The company said the service blocked more than 115 million such installation attempts this year. Google Pay, meanwhile, shows more than a million warnings each week for transactions flagged as potentially fraudulent, according to the company.
Google is also running DigiKavach’s digital fraud awareness campaign, which it says has reached more than 250 million people. The company has partnered with the Reserve Bank of India to publish a public list of authorized digital lending apps and their associated non-bank financial companies to help curb malicious actors.
Earlier this year, Google launched a Security Roadmap in India to expand its AI-driven fraud detection and security efforts, part of a broader plan to deploy more AI tools in the country to tackle growing fraud.
However, Google still faces significant gaps in curbing digital fraud in India. The company – like Apple – has been investigated allowing fake and misleading applications to appear in its app store despite vetting procedures designed to prevent fraudulent submissions.
In recent years, police and security researchers have flagged investment and loan apps used in scams that remained available on the Play Store until the intervention. These cases highlight the challenges Google faces in policing an ecosystem that dominates the country’s smartphone market.
