The New Face of Fraud: Identity, AI and Digital Trust
Diwakar Dayal is the Managing Director and AVP for India and SAARC at SentinelOne. He has over 27 years of experience in IT security, with leadership positions at multinational corporations like Cisco, Juniper, Tenable, NTT, SentinelOne, and Safescrypt (formerly Verisign). Throughout his career, he has successfully launched and grown security businesses from inception to multimillion-dollar success.
As India's digital economy continues to expand, the scale and sophistication of cyber fraud are evolving just as rapidly. From AI-powered phishing campaigns and account takeover attacks to identity theft and deepfake-enabled scams, organizations are facing increasingly complex threats that challenge traditional security approaches. In this rapidly changing landscape, digital trust has become a critical pillar of business resilience, making identity-centric security more important than ever.
Diwakar Dayal, Managing Director & Area Vice President – India & SAARC at SentinelOne, shares his insights into the evolving fraud landscape, the growing role of AI in cybercrime, and why identity has become the foundation of modern fraud prevention.
India's digital economy has grown rapidly. How has the nature of fraud evolved alongside this growth?
India’s digital economy runs on trust. Every UPI payment, loan application, and KYC update assumes the person behind the screen is who they say they are. But attackers have adapted to that trust model by moving from perimeter attacks to identity abuse, where the goal is not to break systems outright but to exploit the credibility of a legitimate account, device, or session. As digital transactions become faster and more seamless, fraudsters are focusing less on forcing their way in and more on blending in.
In the conversations with Indian CISOs and BFSI leaders, one pattern is clear: the most damaging incidents start with identity compromise, not perimeter breaches. Fraud has quietly shifted from being a transaction problem to being an identity problem. That means organizations have to look beyond the transaction itself and examine the trust signals around it; the user, the device, the session, and the behavior.
Also Read: Mercedes-Benz brings 140 Years Drive to India With S-Class Tour
That is why fraud today is harder to spot and easier to scale. A single compromised identity can now be used to move across systems, mimic normal behaviour, and create losses before anyone realises something is wrong. By the time it stands out, the attacker may already have moved money, changed credentials, or used the account to access other systems.
Why has account takeover become such a significant concern for organisations today?
Account takeover is now the starter pistol for large-scale fraud. Criminals steal or guess credentials, then use those accounts to move money, change settings, or reroute funds while appearing legitimate. Across banking, fintech, and e‑commerce, automated tools are constantly testing stolen or weak passwords at scale, looking for the one account that will open the door.
What makes this especially dangerous is that account takeover rarely stays isolated. Once attackers get in, they can use a trusted identity to bypass alerts, exploit existing permissions, and move deeper into systems without triggering the same suspicion as an external intrusion. That is why ATO has become such a critical issue for organisations: it turns legitimate access into a fraud pathway and makes the compromise look like normal user activity.
That is why organisations need to treat every login as a trust decision, not just an access event. Once a valid identity is compromised, the attacker can look like any other user until the damage is already done. In many cases, the fraud only becomes visible after money has moved or controls have already been bypassed. That is why account takeover is not just a login problem. It is a trust problem that can quickly turn into financial and operational risk if it is not caught early.
How are cybercriminals using phishing and AI to make fraud more effective?
Phishing is how attackers begin. Fraud is becoming more personal, not just more sophisticated. They are personalising fraud rather than simply increasing sophistication. Instead of casting a wide net, attackers increasingly use messages disguised as HR updates, tax letters, benefit warnings, or 'limited-time offers' to create urgency and exploit trust. Even experienced users can fall for them when rushed. AI is accelerating this trend, making it easier to craft convincing, targeted messages that feel like they were written for one individual rather than a mailing list.
This is why major fraud instances begin small: a clicked link, a shared password, or a downloaded file. Long before money transfers, the true damage begins.
That is why phishing is no longer just a cybersecurity awareness issue; it is an identity risk issue. Once a user is tricked into giving away credentials or approving a session, the attacker no longer needs to force the door open, they are already inside as a trusted user. From there, the fraud becomes harder to detect because it is operating through legitimate access, not obvious malicious activity.
The bigger risk is that AI has lowered the effort required to run these attacks at scale.
What once took time, language skill, and manual targeting can now be done quickly and repeatedly, making phishing campaigns more adaptive and harder to block.
That means organizations are no longer dealing with just one bad message, but with an evolving attack pattern that learns what works and keeps coming back.
Why has identity become the foundation of fraud prevention, and how is India's regulatory approach reinforcing this shift?
As transactions accelerate, identity becomes the most critical aspect of fraud protection. The majority of fraud revolves around one thing: someone else using your account through phishing, old stolen passwords, or session takeovers.
India's regulatory direction reinforces this. The Reserve Bank of India's Digital Payments Intelligence Platform (DPIP) employs AI and pooled fraud intelligence to detect dangerous transactions before they occur based on mule accounts, device fingerprints, and geography.
Also Read: BigTrunk Communications Bags Media Mandate for Wonder Cement
Separately, the Department of Telecommunications' Digital Intelligence Platform (DIP) brings together over 1,200 stakeholders banks, police, agencies, and telecom operators to share suspected fraud numbers and restrict transactions in real time via the Financial Fraud Risk Indicator (FRI). These are not compliance checkboxes. They validate a bigger idea: the future of fraud prevention lies in understanding identity and behaviour, not just monitoring individual transactions.
What matters is that fraud can no longer be judged only at the transaction level. Organisations need to look at the identity behind the action, the device being used, and whether the behaviour fits the normal pattern. The goal is to catch risk earlier, before it turns into financial loss. That is where the real shift is happening: from reacting after fraud has already happened to identifying warning signs while there is still time to stop it.
What practical steps should Indian enterprises take to strengthen fraud resilience, and why is India uniquely positioned to shape the future of digital trust?
Preparation has to happen before the fraud spike, not during it. Indian enterprises should start by identifying high-risk windows, such as festive seasons, salary days, tax cycles, vendor onboarding periods, and high-volume payment events, and rehearsing response plans in advance. They should also make phishing and account-takeover awareness part of everyday behaviour, not just an annual training exercise, because attackers count on fatigue, familiarity, and speed.
The second step is to build stronger identity governance. That means tighter controls on privileged access, stronger session monitoring, better device and browser validation, and more visibility into how identities behave across endpoints, cloud, and AI-enabled workflows. Organizations also need to define in advance which actions can be automated and which require human review, because fraud response is most effective when machines handle scale and people handle judgment.
A third step is to test how fast fraud can be detected and contained, not just whether it can be detected at all. Many organizations have monitoring in place, but the real question is whether they can shorten the time between first suspicious signal and containment. In a machine-speed threat environment, response delay is itself a vulnerability.
India is uniquely positioned to shape the future of digital trust because it combines scale, speed, and complexity. The same infrastructure that has enabled financial inclusion and digital convenience also creates a high-pressure environment where fraud techniques evolve quickly and at industrial scale. That makes India a critical market for testing how identity-centric, AI-driven, and behavioral fraud defenses should work in the real world. The lessons learned here will matter far beyond India because every digital economy is heading toward the same convergence of payments, identity, automation, and AI.
Looking ahead, what will define the future of cyber resilience and fraud prevention?
The future of cyber resilience will be defined by an organization’s ability to verify trust continuously. Fraud prevention is increasingly an identity challenge rather than a transaction challenge, and that means defences have to operate in real time across humans and non-human identities alike. Static controls will not be enough when access itself can be legitimate while behavior becomes malicious.
Also Read: Hero Motors Sets Up Global Parts Center in Madanapalem, AP
What will matter most is the ability to combine identity intelligence, AI-driven detection, behavioural analytics, and autonomous response so that suspicious activity can be contained before financial loss occurs. This is where the broader shift in cybersecurity becomes visible: security teams need to stop thinking only in terms of alerts and start thinking in terms of execution, trust, and runtime control.
In a digital-first economy like India, trust is not merely a security objective; it is a business imperative. The organizations that win will be the ones that treat identity as the first line of defense and continuously validate whether access is still safe, relevant, and within bounds. The future of fraud prevention will not be decided at the transaction layer. It will be decided at the identity layer.
As fraud becomes more automated and more adaptive, organisations will need defences that can learn and respond at the same speed. The real goal is not just to detect unusual activity, but to understand when trusted access has started to behave like a threat. That shift will define the next phase of cyber resilience.