The government has been persistently making efforts to check cyber frauds under the secure India project, at three levels- National, Organisational and Individual, said Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Communications, Railway, and Electronics & Information Technology.

For coordination among the stakeholders to curb misuse of telecom resources in cyber-crime and financial frauds, ‘Chakshu’ facility on Sanchar Saathi portal under the Department of Telecommunications (DoT)’s ‘Digital Intelligence Platform (DIP)’ was launched on Monday.

Chakshu is a pioneering initiative empowering citizens to proactively report suspected fraud communication. It is the latest addition to the citizen-centric facilities already available on the Sanchar Saathi portal of DoT.

Chakshu facilitates citizens to report suspected fraud communication received over call, SMS or WhatsApp with the intention of defrauding like know your customer (KYC) expiry or update of bank account/ payment wallet/Sim/ gas connection/electricity connection, sextortion, impersonation as a government official/ relative for sending money, disconnection of all mobile numbers by DoT and many more.

The DIP, developed by the DoT, is a secure and integrated platform for real-time intelligence sharing, information exchange and coordination among the stakeholders including telecom service providers (TSPs), law enforcement agencies (LEAs), banks and financial institutions (FIs), social media platforms, and identity document issuing authorities. It also works as a backend repository for the citizen-initiated requests on the Sanchar Saathi portal for action by the stakeholders.

Vaishnaw said the DoT has taken many initiatives to spread awareness so that citizens can make use of such tools for addressing their grievances as well as protect themselves from cyber-frauds.

“We have 35-lakh headers analysed and out of that 1.9 lakh headers have been disabled and that’s the process we are working on, which is one more level of unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) kind of cleansing...we are cognisant of their (customers) problem and solving it in a meticulous way,” Vaishnaw told reporters.

He said data will be shared, almost in real-time, with all stakeholders in case of suspected fraud. Earlier, law enforcement, banks, and financial service providers were all asked to report fraudulent numbers, but they did so individually. Hence, the DoT launched the DIP, a unified platform to report any frauds immediately.

Vaishnaw also informed that across such platforms, frauds worth an estimated ₹1,008 crore have been prevented in the last nine months and ₹1,000 crore total money of Indian citizens have been saved, adding that a total of one crore phone numbers were disconnected and a total of 1.5 lakh handsets blocked for involvement in cyber crimes.

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