I4C warns of deepfake scheme ads

This note is verified from news reports of an advisory. The carousel was posted at 10:55 am IST on 20 October 2026. PTI, carried by The New Indian Express, The Economic Times, India Today, The Times of India, NDTV Profit and the Deccan Herald report an advisory dated 19 October. It comes from the National Cybercrime Threat Analytics Unit of the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, I4C, which sits under the Union Home Ministry. A check of the Press Information Bureau, the Home Ministry and the @Cyberdost account, as of about 8:30 am IST on 20 October, had not found the advisory text itself. On that check, @Cyberdost's nearby post was an 18 October warning about a Pension Card advertisement. The verified stamp here follows the news reports, which quote the advisory in the same terms.

The reports say the advisory describes Facebook and Instagram advertisements that use deepfake or otherwise manipulated videos of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and state chief ministers. In those advertisements, as the advisory is quoted, the videos promote welfare schemes or financial help that the unit calls fake. Many of the advertisements, the advisory says, run under the label "political advertisements". The Economic Times and India Today also describe a second form: cashback, scratch-card and spin-and-win offers. The Deccan Herald's report is one of the accounts of the fee variants.

The path, as the reports set it out, starts at the advertisement and moves to a phone number, a WhatsApp chat or a fake website. The person is then asked, more than once, to pay a tax, a registration fee, a processing fee or a verification fee before any sum is said to arrive. Another path is a UPI collect request, or a screen that asks for the UPI PIN, which sends money out of the account. The Economic Times, quoting the advisory, says many of the calls and WhatsApp messages come from international numbers, in large part numbers that use +92, Pakistan's country code, and that the caller says the person was "randomly selected".

The desk brief notes that one news aggregator framed the warning as WhatsApp scams in the Prime Minister's name. The reports of the advisory describe advertisements on Facebook and Instagram that then send a person on to a call, a WhatsApp chat or a site.

The reports give neither a count of people affected nor a rupee figure, so this note carries neither. It also does not embed a clip or treat any such video as a genuine address. The inset photograph is representational. It is a CC0 image by bohed on Pixabay, via Wikimedia Commons, of a person using a phone. It is a cover illustration, not a picture of a caller or of an advertisement.

The caption, drawn from the same reports of the advisory, lists the checks the unit is asking people to use. Look up a scheme only on that department's own website. Keep an OTP, a UPI PIN, an Aadhaar number, a PAN and bank details away from a stranger. A UPI PIN is the code that sends money. A video of a public figure needs an official source before it is treated as a government message. Anyone who has been asked to pay can call 1930 or file a complaint at cybercrime.gov.in.