The RBI has now allowable authorized card payment networks–covering credit, debit as well as prepaid cards–to offer tokenization military to their customers. This is a banking regulator's effort to improve the safety and security of the payment systems in the country. Tokenization is a process that masks actual card details using a unique exchange code called the "token", which is unique for a grouping of a card, token requestor-for instance m-commerce apps-and devices like smartphones. Thereafter, in lieu of actual card details, this token is used to perform card contact in contactless mode at Point Of Sale (POS) terminals, Quick Response (QR) code payments, in-app payments and the like, thereby protecting cardholders from fraud and data theft.
Opting for tokenization, which masks actual card details, reduce risks related to data theft.
In India, there were 1,035.64 million cards terrific on November 2018, out of which 992.4 million were debit cards and 43.24 million were credit cards and this has grown from a total 778.98 million cards in 2016. This impressive growth, in other words, represents the increased use of this cashless mode of payment. The volume of card transactions, in fact, went up by 1.5 times in this period. In value terms these transactions more than doubled-from Rs 1,82,300 crore in November 2016 to Rs 3,83,904 crore in November 2018. This was driven by debit and credit card transactions, which grew by 113.3 percent and 94.7 percent, correspondingly, in value terms during the period.
But this also presents more opportunity cybercriminals. Sample this: As per the National Crime Records Bureau, cases register under cyber frauds doubled between 2014 and 2016. Cases registered under cheating, forgery and criminal breach of trust or fraud for cyber crimes went up from 1,232 in 2014 to 2,466 in 2016. Although over 90 percent of these cyber crimes are registered under cheating, cases registered under the credit or debit card frauds increased from 10 in 2014 to 26 in 2016.
Indian Police have been continuously fighting cybercrime and has taken up multiple initiatives (cybercrime labs, response centers, cyber forensic labs etc.) to counter it. State government and state police are continuously developing new anti-cybercrime measures with the help of central government and private organizations.
Other than these initiatives, training, and development of police officers in the field of identifying and solving cyber crimes have been made imperative to keep police updated about latest criminal activities and the methods required to tackle it. A recent ASSOCHAM-NEC joint study estimates the cyber security market size in India to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 36.2 percent between 2017 & 2021.
