

Two rules for fraud victims. IDFC Bank shows how some cases see swift action
₹590 crore siphoned from Haryana government accounts through the bank’s Chandigarh branch, allegedly by employees colluding with outsiders—is dismaying but not surprising. Bank frauds of this kind have happened before and will happen again. That alone is not what is driving the fury on social media.What is driving it is something else entirely.Most of the funds were restored or secured within about a day.
Haryana’s chief minister announced that nearly ₹556 crore had been recovered almost immediately. The bank reimbursed the state, including interest. The Reserve Bank of India declared there was no systemic risk.
Everyone moved on.And that is precisely what is making ordinary people so furious. They are holding this story up against their own experience, and the contrast is unbearable.Two years ago, I wrote in this column about the epidemic of digital financial scams targeting Indians. The scale was already enormous then; it has only grown since.
The government recently placed numbers on the problem in Parliament. Through April 2021 to September 2025, cybercriminals defrauded Indian citizens of nearly ₹3,588 crore across 583,000 reported cases. The overwhelming majority involved internet banking fraud and online credit-card scams.And of that ₹3,588 crore? Exactly ₹239 crore, or about 6.7%, has been recovered.
When an ordinary person is defrauded, the system retrieves roughly six paise of every rupee stolen.Six paise.Now compare that with the IDFC case, where a government entity recovered 94% of the money in a single day. A large portion of the funds has not been recovered from the criminals; the bank reimbursed the Haryana government from its own pocket almost immediately. Not just that, the next morning’s newspapers
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