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Stream/Area:
-
Subject:
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Paper ID:
IJSREM66338
Volume:
10 |
7 |
Jul 2026
Pages:
1-9
Publication Frequency:
Monthly (12 issues per year)
License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.
Management
KCES's College of Engineering & Management, Jalgaon
The exponential growth of digital technology and internet connectivity has transformed the online gaming landscape in India into a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem, simultaneously creating fertile ground for sophisticated cybercriminal activity. This paper investigates the nature, scale, and socio-economic impact of online gaming fraud on Indian youth, with a particular focus on real victim incidents documented in Maharashtra — the state reporting the highest volume of cybercrime complaints in India. Drawing on six case studies from Maharashtra between 2022 and 2025, secondary crime data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), and a synthesis of contemporary scholarly literature, the study examines how deceptive strategies — including phishing, fake reward mechanisms, account manipulation, and psychological pressure — are deployed against young and semi-literate digital users. The findings reveal that victims range from rural farmers to urban businesspersons, and that financial losses span from a few lakh to several crore rupees per individual, with aggregate state-level losses running into thousands of crore. The paper further identifies critical gaps in legal enforcement, digital literacy, and victim support infrastructure. Building on these findings, actionable policy recommendations are presented, covering regulatory reform, law enforcement capacity-building, platform accountability, and victim rehabilitation. The study contributes a ground-level, context-specific perspective to the growing body of literature on digital fraud in developing economies.
KEYWORDS
Online gaming fraud in India is not a marginal phenomenon. It is a large-scale, systematically organized form of financial crime that targets the emotional and psychological vulnerabilities of young digital users, causes severe and often irrecoverable financial harm, and is enabled by structural inadequacies in regulation, enforcement, and digital literacy. Maharashtra's experience — as India's most cyber-crime-affected state, and one in which real losses measured in crore rupees have been experienced by individuals across the socio-economic spectrum — provides a compelling case study for the national policy conversation.
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Publication Date
7/27/2026
Peer Review Type
Double-Blind Peer Review
Review Rounds: 2
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The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this research work.
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