Google is bringing more AI muscle 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 come online for the first time and increasingly rely on smartphones for payments, shopping, and accessing government services. Fraud involving digital transactions accounted for 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 (roughly $789 million) in losses in the first five months of 2025, the Ministry of Home Affairs said. Many incidents likely go unreported, either because victims are unsure how to file a complaint or wish to avoid additional scrutiny.
On Thursday, Google announced the expansion of its real-time scam-detection feature, which uses Gemini Nano to analyze calls on-device and flag potential fraud without recording audio or sending data to Google’s servers. The feature is off by default and applies only to calls from unknown numbers, and it plays a beep during the conversation to notify participants. It debuted in the U.S. in March as a beta for English-speaking Pixel 9 users.
Google confirmed to TechCrunch that its on-device scam detection will initially work only on Pixel 9 and later models in India and will be limited to English-speaking users, with its warning also English only. That restricts its reach in a market where Android accounts for nearly 96% of smartphones, per Statcounter, but Pixel devices held less than 1% share in 2024. The language limitation is also notable in a country where most users primarily rely on non-English languages — an audience that Google and others like Amazon have acknowledged by adding support for Indian languages across their services in recent years.
Image Credits:Google
The tech giant did say it was working to bring scam detection to non-Pixel Android phones, as well, without offering a timeline.
Google also announced a pilot in India with financial apps Navi, Paytm, and Google Pay aimed at limiting screen-sharing scams, in which 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 initially tested in the U.K.
Users with devices running Android 11 or later will be able to 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 the feature will display alerts in Indian languages as well but did not provide details.
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For several months, Google has also been using its Play Protect service to restrict predatory loan apps in India by blocking the sideloading of third-party apps that request sensitive permissions often exploited for fraud. The company said the service blocked more than 115 million such installation attempts this year. Google Pay, meanwhile, surfaces more than a million warnings each week for transactions flagged as potentially fraudulent, according to the company.
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