An emerging cybercrime trend called ‘rent-a-bank-account’ fraud is sweeping across India, turning unsuspecting individuals into money mules. Lured by easy cash offers on platforms like Telegram, victims are unknowingly facilitating money laundering linked to phishing scams, dark web dealings, and GST fraud — posing grave financial and national security risks.
From Desperation to Crime: How Scammers Recruit Victims
Ajay, a college student from Pune, never thought his search for part-time income would land him in a cybercrime probe. After losing his job during the pandemic, Ajay responded to a Telegram message offering ₹5,000 per week for simply “lending” his bank account. Believing it was legal and risk-free, he shared his account credentials and even remote access to UPI and net banking.
Within days, suspicious transactions ranging between ₹80,000 and ₹1.2 lakh began pouring in and were quickly siphoned off. Soon after, his account was frozen, and the cyber cell came knocking. It turned out his account had been used to launder stolen money from a phishing scheme targeting the elderly.
This is the alarming reality of the ‘rent-a-bank-account’ scam—a digital racket where cybercriminals recruit citizens to serve as intermediaries for laundering proceeds of crime, often without their full knowledge of the consequences.
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The Dark Underbelly: National Security and Financial System Risks
At first glance, these may appear as isolated incidents of financial fraud. But experts warn the implications are far more severe. Amit Relan, CEO of mFilterIt, explains that rented accounts are often used to channel money from scams, gambling portals, GST fraud networks, shell company operations, and even terror-linked financing.
“What seems like a harmless favour can quickly spiral into a serious crime. These accounts become conduits for criminal or terrorist financing,” Relan noted. Not only are the account holders legally liable, but they’re also morally complicit in the ecosystem of financial deception.
Banks typically blacklist such accounts, ruining the credit history of unsuspecting individuals and locking them out of formal financial systems—sometimes permanently. The fraud also burdens law enforcement with complex cross-jurisdictional challenges and slows down money trail investigations.
The Road Ahead: From Awareness to Coordinated Action
Industry leaders stress the urgency of a nationwide crackdown. Relan revealed that India may be witnessing 50,000 to 1,00,000 new such compromised accounts every month, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in the financial ecosystem.
Ashish Singhal, CEO of IBDIC, emphasized the need for regional awareness campaigns, enhanced KYC protocols, and cross-sector collaboration between banks, telecom companies, and regulators. “This scam isn’t just about bad actors—it’s about people who unknowingly become tools of financial crime,” he said.
Experts argue that tech platforms and law enforcement must go beyond fragmented responses and instead create real-time intelligence-sharing frameworks on compromised accounts, similar to those used in cyber threat detection networks.
The ultimate solution lies in proactive deterrence—educating the public, tightening on-boarding checks, and deploying AI-based monitoring tools to flag abnormal transaction behavior across banking networks. As India digitizes rapidly, its weakest security links may no longer be software vulnerabilities, but ordinary citizens seduced by small payouts.
Conclusion
The ‘rent-a-bank-account’ scam is a reminder that financial fraud isn’t always orchestrated by hardened criminals—it’s often enabled by vulnerable individuals unaware of the true cost. What begins with a few thousand rupees can result in frozen accounts, criminal charges, and national security breaches. Without unified action, the scam threatens to erode both financial integrity and public trust in India’s digital economy.