Google steps up AI scam protection in India, but gaps remain

Google is adding more AI power to India’s fight against digital fraud, rolling out on-device scam detection for Pixel 9 devices and new screen sharing alerts for financial apps.

Digital fraud continues to rise in India as more people move online for the first time and increasingly rely on smartphones for payments, shopping and access to government services. Fraud with digital transactions has been taken into account more than 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). Online scams caused an estimated ₹70 billion (about $789 million) in losses in the first five months of 2025, the Interior Ministry said. Many incidents likely go unreported because victims are unsure how to file a complaint or want to avoid additional investigation.

Thursday Google announced the expansion of the real-time scam detection feature, which uses Gemini Nano to analyze calls on the device and flag potential fraud without recording audio or sending data to Google’s servers. The feature is disabled by default and only applies to calls from unknown numbers, and it will beep during the call to notify participants. It debuted in the US in March as a beta for English-speaking Pixel 9 users.

Google has confirmed to TechCrunch that the on-device scam detection will initially only work on Pixel 9 and later models in India and will be limited to English-speaking users, with the warning also only in English. That limits its reach in a market that Android takes into account almost 96% of smartphonesper StatCounter, but Pixel devices owned less than 1% of the shares 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 did say it was working to bring scam detection to non-Pixel Android phones, without offering a timeline.

Google also announced a pilot in India with financial apps Navi, Paytm and Google Pay, aimed at mitigating screen sharing scams, where fraudsters persuade victims to share 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 Britain

Users with devices running Android 11 or later can access the alerts, 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 that the feature will also display alerts in Indian languages, but did not provide details.

For several months now, Google has also been using its Play Protect service to limit predatory lending apps in India by blocking sideloading of third-party apps that request 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, issues more than a million alerts every week for transactions that the company says are flagged as potentially fraudulent.

Google is also running its DigiKavach digital fraud awareness campaign, which it claims has reached more than 250 million people. The company has collaborated with the Reserve Bank of India to publish a public list of authorized digital lending apps and their associated non-banking financial companies to help curtail malicious actors.

Earlier this year, Google launched a security charter 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 rising fraud.

Yet Google still faces significant gaps in reducing digital fraud in India. Questions have been asked about the company, just like Apple allowing fake and misleading apps to appear in the app store, despite review processes designed to block fraudulent submissions.

In recent years Police And security researchers have flagged investment and lending apps used in scams that remained available on the Play Store until intervention. These cases underscore the challenges Google faces in overseeing an ecosystem that dominates the country’s smartphone market.