Amazon Launches Safe Shopping Handbook To Fight AI Scams Targeting India’s First Time Internet Users
Amazon has launched a new handbook and expanded legal unit to fight AI powered scams specifically targeting India’s newest internet users, first time shoppers and older adults, who research shows fall for fraud far more often than seasoned digital natives.
Highlights:
- Amazon India has launched a consumer handbook covering nine common scams as part of its Mission GraHAQ programme
- The initiative specifically targets first time internet users, senior citizens and other vulnerable shoppers
- Amazon’s SENTRIX system can identify and report malicious phishing websites within 24 hours
- India ranks among the top global targets for international scam syndicates, second only to the United States
- The company has expanded its Counterfeit Crimes Unit in India to build prosecutable fraud cases
Every year, tens of millions of Indians go online for the first time, often through a shared family phone, often trusting exactly the kind of official sounding message that a scammer now knows precisely how to fake. Amazon has decided that gap, between a new user’s trust and a scammer’s growing sophistication, is where the next wave of fraud in India will be won or lost.
The company marked the latest chapter of its ongoing Mission GraHAQ programme by commissioning the launch of Your Guide to Safe Online Shopping, a consumer handbook developed with Safer Internet India, now available to shoppers across the country. The handbook walks through nine of the most common scams facing Indian consumers today, fake delivery notifications, payment fraud, fraudulent customer support accounts, and membership renewal scams among them, pairing each one with real world scenarios and clear warning signs.
The specific audience this handbook was built for matters as much as its content. Amazon has framed the initiative around what it calls turning every consumer into a Viksit GraHAQ, an evolved, empowered shopper, built around three deliberate steps, awareness, action, and resources. The first of those steps, awareness, begins with Shikshit GraHAQ, the informed consumer, and it is explicitly aimed at the segment of India’s online population least equipped to spot a scam before it lands, first time internet users, senior citizens, and shoppers in underserved communities who are only just beginning to move their daily lives online.
That focus is not incidental. Research into who actually falls for these scams paints a fairly consistent picture, and it is not the one most people assume. A McAfee study on scam behaviour around major Indian shopping events found that shoppers aged 18 to 24 were the most vulnerable group by a wide margin, with 17 percent reporting they had fallen for a scam, compared to just 5 percent among adults aged 65 and older. The emotional cost of getting caught out compounds the financial one, nearly one in five victims chose not to report the fraud at all, largely out of embarrassment.
The technology powering these scams has moved considerably faster than most consumer awareness campaigns have managed to keep pace with. Cybersecurity researchers have documented deepfake videos of influencers endorsing fake products, AI generated delivery notifications indistinguishable from genuine ones, and bogus discount messages engineered to create exactly the kind of urgency that short circuits careful judgment. According to McAfee’s own research, 39 percent of Indian consumers encountered deepfake scams or fake celebrity endorsements during a single major shopping event, and 81 percent received suspicious messages of some kind.
“Scammers exploiting India’s first time internet users and vulnerable communities have grown increasingly sophisticated,” said one company statement describing the campaign’s rationale, framing the effort as a direct response to fraud that has outpaced the digital literacy of the audience it targets.
Amazon’s own technical response leans heavily on the exact same category of technology the scammers themselves are exploiting. The company built SENTRIX, an AI powered system capable of identifying and reporting malicious phishing websites in under 24 hours, and identifying scam phone numbers within the same day they are reported. That speed matters enormously in a landscape where a fake website or number can do real financial damage within hours of going live, long before a slower, manual takedown process would ever catch up.
“AI is making scams more sophisticated by enabling criminals to clone voices and create more convincing frauds,” said Rakesh Mohan Bakshi, Amazon India’s legal head, in comments describing the broader threat landscape the company is now navigating. He added that the same underlying technology is simultaneously strengthening Amazon’s own ability to detect scammers, trace their activity, and support law enforcement investigations, a dynamic where AI is functioning as both the weapon and the shield in the same fight.
Bakshi’s remarks came alongside a broader institutional response, the expansion of Amazon’s global Counterfeit Crimes Unit into India, bringing together lawyers, former law enforcement officials, and risk analysts specifically to build cases that can actually be prosecuted rather than simply flagged and forgotten. He described the move as proactive rather than reactive, framing India’s ecommerce market as one that has genuinely outgrown the pace at which regulation has managed to catch up, a gap Amazon is investing heavily to close on its own terms, alongside a broader 48 billion dollar commitment to India’s ecommerce and cloud infrastructure through 2030.
The scale of the threat sitting behind these numbers extends well beyond any single retailer’s platform. Meta’s own security reporting for the first half of 2026 found India ranked among the top global targets for international scam syndicates, trailing only the United States, a ranking that places the country squarely in the crosshairs of increasingly professionalised, cross border fraud operations rather than isolated, opportunistic scammers working alone.
It is worth applying a fair amount of scrutiny to how effective handbooks and awareness campaigns of this kind actually prove in practice, rather than assuming publication alone solves the underlying problem. Consumer education initiatives have a long, somewhat mixed track record across the cybersecurity industry generally, awareness genuinely helps, but it consistently helps the segment of users already engaged enough to seek out and read a handbook in the first place, precisely the group least likely to be the most vulnerable. The first time internet users this campaign explicitly targets are, almost by definition, the group least likely to encounter a downloadable safety guide unless it reaches them through channels considerably more passive and persistent than a one time publication, a flyer tucked into a delivery box, a WhatsApp forward, a conversation with a more digitally literate family member.
There is also a fair, more uncomfortable question sitting underneath a large platform positioning itself as the primary educator against fraud carried out largely in its own name. Amazon benefits considerably from being seen as the responsible actor fighting impersonation scams, but it is also the single most impersonated brand in Indian ecommerce fraud precisely because of how deeply trusted and widely used its name already is, meaning the same brand recognition Amazon has spent two decades building in India is the exact asset scammers are exploiting when they send a fake delivery notification. The company’s own defensive investment, real and substantial as it is, exists in a fairly direct arms race against the scale of its own success.
None of this diminishes the genuine value of tools like SENTRIX, or the real utility of a handbook that lays out nine specific, common scam patterns in plain language for someone encountering them for the first time. Whether initiatives like Mission GraHAQ actually reach the first time internet users they are explicitly designed for, rather than primarily reassuring the already digitally confident shoppers who read Amazon’s press materials, is the harder question this launch raises without fully answering, and the one that will ultimately determine whether India’s newest internet users end up genuinely safer, or simply better informed after the fact.
