Tuesday 6 October, 2026
Permission Granted, Cases Still Open
When an Indian consumer is scammed, they tell someone. The survey finds that 86% of victims take the case to an organisation, compared with 69% across the six ASEAN markets surveyed (ASEAN-6). An organisation took responsibility for 65% of reported cases, compared with 53%, and 33% of reported cases remain unresolved, compared with 45%. Among victims who lost money, 33% recover some or all of it, compared with 18%.
Real harm remains behind those figures. A third of reported cases end unresolved, and 67% of victims who lost money recover nothing.
Indian consumers also extend institutions an unusual level of permission to use their data. Some 87% are comfortable with their bank or financial provider holding and using their data to detect fraud, 82% with government, 81% with their mobile operator and 73% with digital platforms. Each figure is higher than the corresponding ASEAN-6 result. Operators are rated highly on delivery as well: 65% rate their mobile operator’s protection 8 or above out of 10, compared with 49% across ASEAN-6, and the gap between the responsibility consumers assign operators and the protection they rate them on is 9.2 percentage points, compared with 23.9 across ASEAN-6.
Permission is not uniform. Consumers whose case was resolved report higher comfort with institutions using their data than those whose case remains unresolved: 88% compared with 64% for government, and 87% compared with 57% for digital platforms. For banks the difference is small, 87% compared with 85%.
The opportunity is to turn that trust and permission into stronger protection. Indian consumers report only a narrow gap between the friction they already experience in online transactions, at 6.4 out of 10, and the most they say they would accept for stronger protection, at 6.9. That points towards better resolution, better recovery and closer coordination between institutions rather than more checks at the point of payment. 3
