A state that files more cybercrime cases than anywhere else in the country also managed to cut its losses by a fifth in a single year. The DGP says that’s not enough — and that policing itself is about to be redefined by this one crime category.

Telangana’s cybercrime numbers for 2025 read like two different stories at once. On one hand, fraudsters cheated residents of the state out of ₹1,524 crore over the year — a figure DGP C.V. Anand pointed to while calling cybercrime the biggest challenge facing law enforcement today, warning that failing to control it effectively could have serious consequences. On the other, Telangana out-performed every other state in the country on the metrics that matter most: it registered more FIRs, recovered more victim money, and cut its own losses by a fifth compared to the year before.

Losses down, even as fraud stayed enormous

Cyber fraud losses in Telangana fell from an estimated ₹1,905 crore in 2024 to ₹1,524 crore in 2025 — a 20 percent year-on-year reduction, based on the officially reported decline.

To put the scale in context: officials noted that while every other category of crime in the state combined resulted in losses of about ₹207 crore, cybercrime alone accounted for ₹1,524 crore — nearly seven times more than all other crime types put together. That comparison is doing real work here: it’s not that cybercrime is a growing nuisance alongside traditional policing, it’s rapidly becoming the larger of the two problems.

Nearly half the country’s cybercrime FIRs, from one state

Of the 49,620 cybercrime FIRs registered nationwide in 2025, Telangana alone accounted for 21,639 — a 44 percent share, putting one in every 2.3 cybercrime FIRs filed in India inside a single state.

That share is unusual enough to need explaining, and officials frame it as a sign of strength rather than a red flag: a high FIR count in a state that also reported fraud losses can mean citizens are actually reporting crimes and police are actually converting complaints into registered cases, rather than letting them stall. Complaints themselves told a calmer story — Telangana recorded 91,369 cybercrime complaints in 2025, a 3 percent decline from the year before — while FIR conversion improved sharply, reaching 78 percent for high-value fraud cases above ₹75 lakh and 56 percent for cases above ₹1 lakh.

More money getting back to victims

The amount held in fraudsters’ accounts rose from ₹255 crore in 2024 to ₹279 crore in 2025. The hold percentage — how much of the defrauded amount investigators manage to freeze before it disappears — rose from 9 percent to 12 percent year over year. Separately, the Telangana Cyber Security Bureau’s own annual report put total recovered funds at ₹246.22 crore for 2025, up 23 percent from ₹200.98 crore in 2024, with ₹159.65 crore of that returned directly to 24,498 victims through Lok Adalats and courts.

The tools behind the numbers

During the review, Anand was shown a live demonstration of the Bureau’s AI-powered Cyber Call Centre — a system built to respond to a fraud victim’s call, collect key details like identity, location and the nature of the offence, and simultaneously alert the jurisdictional police station so officers can act immediately rather than waiting for a complaint to move through the usual paperwork chain. He directed officials to expand this kind of AI-driven citizen service further.

The Bureau’s broader structure — its cyber lab, security operations centre, central monitoring unit, social media unit, child protection unit and digital forensic unit — was also reviewed. The Child Protection Unit, launched in February 2025, has already processed close to 100,000 cyber tip lines and led to hundreds of arrests tied to online child sexual exploitation material, according to the Bureau’s annual report.

DGP C.V. Anand

Cybercriminals often lure you on the promise of easy and high returns. If an offer appears too good to be true, pause and verify.

Why the DGP still isn’t satisfied

Despite leading the country on FIR registration and improving on almost every internal metric, Anand was candid that Telangana is lagging on some parameters tracked by the central government, and pushed officers to treat this as unfinished business rather than a result to coast on. His framing was structural, not just tactical: he told officers that the future of policing will increasingly revolve around cybercrime, and asked every officer — not just specialists — to build strong technological skills and sharpen their cyber investigation expertise.

That’s a notable ask for a conventional police force. It implies the Cyber Security Bureau’s specialised units can’t be the only part of the department fluent in this kind of crime — because the volume and financial scale of cyber fraud, at nearly seven times the losses from every other crime category combined, no longer fits inside a specialist silo.

The bigger picture

Telangana’s trajectory here isn’t a one-year blip. The state’s cyber losses had peaked at roughly ₹1,200 crore in 2023-24 by one accounting before dropping to ₹681 crore in 2024-25, and the state has drawn attention from Karnataka and Maharashtra for a model combining technology, public awareness campaigns, and enforcement. Set against a national picture where India lost over ₹10,000 crore to cybercrime in 2024 and complaint volumes rose nationally even as Telangana’s fell, the state’s 20 percent reduction in 2025 looks less like luck and more like a sustained, multi-year bet on treating cybercrime as core police work rather than a side desk.

Whether that bet scales — both across Telangana’s own remaining gaps and as a model for other states — is the question Anand’s warning was really pointing at. Leading the country in FIRs is a measure of how well a state catches up to fraud after it happens. Cutting losses by a fifth is a measure of getting ahead of it. Telangana, on its own numbers, is doing more of the first than most states manage, and only just enough of the second to call it progress.