Fraud, Phishing, and Fear: A Deep Dive into Bihar’s Cybercrime Landscape

Abstract

Cybercrime has emerged as a serious issue in Bihar, India, with numbers growing over the past several years. Herein, we offer a comprehensive review of cybercrime trends in Bihar in 2023–2025 based on publicly available data. Our study sets the context and rationale for examining cybercrime trends in the state with goals such as mapping leading cybercrime types, gauging the size of the cases, measuring citizen awareness, and examining the evolution of law enforcement response. We examine official police reports, National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reports, and case studies to delineate the cybercrime profile. Our study finds a remarkable rise in reported cyber fraud complaints – from about 42,000 in 2023 to more than 73,000 in 2024 – with financial frauds (banking scams, OTP/phishing attacks, SIM swap scams) making up the vast majority ( ≳ 80%) of cases [1, 7]. Other repeat crimes include identity theft and social media abuse, online exam and recruitment scams, and SIM card scams. Although we see growth, public awareness remains an issue; many citizens remain vulnerable due to low cybersecurity literacy and the evolving modus operandi of con men. Our study also discovers major improvements in Bihar's cyber policing infrastructure since 2023, including the opening of special cyber police stations, a 24×7 cyber helpline (1930), and special operations leading to hundreds of arrests [3, 7]. We offer quantifiable findings with trend graphs, crime-type composition, and district-wise complaint and arrest distribution. The discussion briefly considers topics such as resource availability, jurisdictional issues, and weak conviction rates, and offers policy suggestions for enhancing technical capability, inter-state coordination, public awareness campaigns, and legislation. The paper summarizes that although Bihar has witnessed significant improvement in the fight against cybercrimes (e.g., freezing of ₹66+ crore of fake funds in 2024 alone [7]), a sustained campaign in capacity development and public awareness needs to be evinced to stem the rising tide of cyber offenses.