In the last 2 years, with the online work during the Covid-19 period, there has been a significant increase in online shopping and transactions and perhaps due to this more people are now becoming victims of online fraud. Recently Microsoft released its Global Tech Support Scam Research report, which pointed that 70% of Indian users have been victims of tech support scams in the last year. Indian consumers have experienced a relatively high scam encounter rate.
Online fraud rising for Indian customers
At the same time, there has been a decrease of 5% in such scam encounters globally in the last year. According to this report, 59% of the people globally have become victims of online fraud. If we talk about India, then about 48% of the users included in the survey have been victims of online fraud continuously.
This is an 8 point increase from the year 2018. In India, people between the age group of 24-37 have been targeted the most this year. About 58% of the people of this age have lost their money due to online scams. Out of these, men constitutes 73%.
Increased number of complaints every month
Each month Microsoft receives more than 6,000 complaints about online fraud from all over the world. According to Mary Jo Schrade, Assistant General Counsel (Asia, Regional Lead), Microsoft Digital Crime Unit, the number of tech support frauds, ie online frauds, is increasing rapidly globally.
People of all ages are falling prey to it. The survey points that India has the highest number of such cases in the world. This means that Indian customers were rapidly getting scammed.