As digital payments and online services increasingly become a part of daily life in India, cybercrime has also emerged as a serious security threat for the citizens. For those who fall victim to cybercrime, seeking redressal from the police often involves more than procedural delays, such as the time taken or the number of visits to the police station.
The experience of cybercrime victims with the police is also significantly shaped by their direct interactions with police personnel themselves. This includes situations when victims feel like they must offer a bribe to get their case moving, or turn to someone in their personal network to exert pressure when nothing else seems to work.
The Status of Policing in India Report (SPIR) 2026, based on a survey of 8,306 citizens conducted by Lokniti-CSDS and Common Cause across 16 States, examines this question directly: Once a victim decides to complain, what actually determines whether the police act on it? How often do victims turn to a bribe or personal contacts, and does doing so make a difference to their chances of recovering the money they have lost?
Paying to be heard
Nearly half of the victims surveyed — 49 per cent — said that they had complained to the police after the cybercrime. Another 9 per cent went to the police initially but did not pursue the case further, while 39 per cent did not complain at all.
Among those who did complain to the police, more than a quarter (27%) said that they had to make a payment to the police at some point to get their case handled. However, some victims were far more likely to pay this price than others. More than one in three women (35%) paid a bribe to the police as opposed to 22 per cent of male victims. Over a third of the victims in rural areas (36%) were more prone to paying a bribe to the police in comparison to a fourth of the victims in urban areas (24%). The sharpest trend is observed along class lines. Over half of the victims from poor economic backgrounds (51%) had to pay a bribe to the police, as compared to 12 per cent of those from affluent economic backgrounds, making a poor victim more than four times as likely to pay as a wealthy one (Table 1).
The findings from the survey show that paying a bribe to the police was also associated with a better chance of getting the lost money back.
Furthermore, the findings show that paying a bribe to the police was also associated with a better chance of getting the lost money back. Among the victims who paid a bribe, 41 per cent recovered the full amount lost, compared with only 12 per cent of those who did not pay – a difference of 29 percentage points. In the same vein, the proportion of no recovery almost halved among those who had paid the bribe (35%) than those who had not (68%) (Table 2).
The network of influence
Bribery was not the only informal route victims used to move their case forward. More than a third of the victims, 37 per cent, said that they contacted someone in their personal network – senior police or government officials or local politicians – to press the police to handle their case properly.
As with bribery, this reliance on connections was more likely among women victims (41%) than men (35%). Rural victims also turned to their networks slightly more often than their urban counterparts (44% vs. 35% respectively). Once again, the widest gap is by class: 55 per cent of poor victims used a personal contact, against 30 per cent of the rich and 31 per cent of the middle class (Table 3).
In the case of both bribery and use of personal networks, it is the women, poor and the rural who report using these informal channels the most, not because they have more money or more powerful contacts to draw on, but seemingly because they have fewer other ways to get the system to work to address their grievances.
Here too, the informal route was linked to better outcomes. A third of the victims (32%) who used a personal network recovered the full amount lost to cyber fraud in comparison to 13 per cent of those victims who did not contact anyone, thus highlighting that a working connection roughly tripled the odds of full recovery (Table 4).
The need for change
Together, the two sets of findings point to the same pattern: bribery and personal influence function as parallel, unofficial channels through which cybercrime victims try to secure police action. Both channels are used more often, and appear to work more often, for the victims located on marginalised social positions: women, the poor, and those living in rural areas.
What the findings show clearly is that for a significant proportion of cybercrime victims in India, formal police procedure on its own is not enough to recover what has been lost. Until FIR registration and bank-police coordination for cyber fraud are made a matter of enforceable procedure, a payment or a phone call to the right person will remain, for a large share of India’s cybercrime victims, the only reliable route back to their own money.
(Priyanka Mittal is a researcher at Lokniti-CSDS. Views expressed are personal. This analysis is based on data collected during a comprehensive study on The Status of Policing in India Report 2026 jointly conducted by Lokniti-CSDS & Common Cause.)
Published – September 30, 2026 07:30 am IST
