A new breed of robber has entered the valleys and towns of Jammu and Kashmir. It carries no weapon, wears no mask, and needs no cover of darkness. It arrives instead through a WhatsApp message, a missed call, or a voice on the phone claiming to speak for the bank or the police. By the time the victim understands what has happened, savings accumulated over a lifetime of labour have vanished without a trace.
The scale of this menace is no longer a matter of speculation. Cyber fraud complaints linked to Jammu and Kashmir crossed eighteen thousand in 2025, with losses exceeding ₹184 crore — a figure that, multiplied across the country, runs into thousands of crores lost to investment scams, fake digital arrests, and phishing calls. Behind every rupee lost lies a story: a retired employee tricked into sharing an OTP, a young job-seeker lured by promises of guaranteed returns on a Telegram channel, an elderly couple terrorised by a fraudster posing as a senior police officer on a video call. These are not stray misfortunes. They are the product of an organised criminal economy that has learned to exploit fear, greed, and the very convenience that digital banking promised to deliver.
It would be unfair to say that the response has been absent. Cyber police units in the Union Territory have dismantled several fraud networks, frozen accounts, and made arrests, while the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre has built helplines and real-time blocking mechanisms that have already recovered significant sums nationally. Yet enforcement alone cannot outpace a crime that reinvents itself with every new app and every new scam script. The first line of defence, ultimately, rests with the citizen.
This calls for a shift in public habit rather than mere awareness campaigns. No bank, no police officer, no government office will ever ask for an OTP, a UPI PIN, or a password over the phone — that single fact, if internalised by every household in Kashmir, would close off the most common entry point for fraud. Equally important is the discipline of independent verification: hanging up on a suspicious caller and dialling the bank’s own helpline rather than any number the caller provides. Investment offers promising assured high returns deserve the same suspicion once reserved for door-to-door swindlers. And every incident, however small, ought to be reported within minutes to the 1930 helpline, since speed of reporting is often what determines whether stolen money can still be recovered.
Jammu and Kashmir is in the midst of an economic revival that digital banking has helped accelerate. That same digital infrastructure must not be allowed to become the easiest route by which its gains are stolen back. The thieves have organised themselves well. It is time the people they prey upon organised themselves better.
