DoT’s new Initiative “FRI” to prevent CyberCrimes
As you all know, the number of cyber crimes, especially cyber financial frauds, is increasing day by day. The government and its various agencies have taken many steps to prevent cyber frauds in the last few years. The most important among them are Sanchar Saathi, Cyber Helpline, separate Cyber Police Stations, Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) and Cyber Crime Complaint Portal (www.cybercrime.gov.in), on which I have written about at length in my CyberMithra columns in the past, please do visit them and read for more information. In this column, I am going to talk about the Financial Fraud Risk Indicator (FRI) developed by the Department of Telecommunications on the advice of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to prevent cyber crimes.
What is “Financial Fraud Risk Indicator (FRI)”?
The Financial Fraud Risk Indicator (FRI), launched by the Digital Intelligence Unit (DIU) of the Department of Telecommunications(DoT) in May 2025, is a risk-based metric that categorizes mobile numbers you send money to as normal, medium and high risk based on the risk of financial fraud. This categorisation is a result of inputs received from various stakeholders including the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (ICCC), National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP), the Department of Telecommunications’ “Chakshu” platform and intelligence shared by banks and financial institutions. It empowers stakeholders especially banks, NBFCs and UPI service providers, to prevent money disbursement to such high-risk mobile numbers and take additional consumer protection measures. Its main objective is to reduce suspicious transactions, notify or warn customers and delay transactions identified as high risk. The utility of this system has already been demonstrated with major institutions like PhonePe, Punjab National Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Paytm and India Post Payments Bank. FRI allows for quick, targeted and collaborative action against suspected frauds in the telecom and financial sectors.
How does the “Financial Fraud Risk Indicator (FRI)” help prevent cybercrime?
PhonePe, one of the first to adopt FRI, has used it to deny transactions linked to high-FRI tagged mobile numbers and display an on-screen warning message as part of the PhonePe Protect feature. Data shared by PhonePe indicates the effectiveness of FRI as it has been found that the high-risk mobile numbers indicated by FRI are the ones that are implicated in most cyber fraud cases. Other major UPI service providers like GooglePay and PayTM have also started implementing FRI strategy by implementing measures like delaying money transfers to risky numbers indicated by FRI, warning users and obtaining their approval for money transfers in their apps. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), in its notification dated June 30, 2025, has directed all banks and other financial institutions to implement FRI in their financial systems. The integration of FRI in customer-facing systems is expected to become an industry standard, which is expected to bring systemic resilience to prevent cyber financial frauds in India’s digital financial ecosystem.
